How do you Handle "Rare" People

[PandDLong]

How do you handle those people who appear rarely in your photos and you want to have their name associated with the photo?  Do you add everyone to your People database or do you take a different approach?


As the default family historian, a key goal of my iMatch catalogue is linking people to photos and then to share them.

I use face annotations and manual links to identify people and I reference the 'Person in Image' tag to display/print the names of the people associated in the photo (and I use the annotation order to give me the correct left-to-right sequence of names).  I use the People panel to quickly identify all the pictures of a given person (I could also use a category).   All good - very good.

Now, I am scanning older photographs and there are many important people who will only appear a few times (or maybe just once).   I am reluctant to add all of them to the iMatch People database as I would rather not have a long list of people to scroll through in the future when many entries will be so rare.  I am also reluctant to have facial recognition use them as it may be counter-productive (wrong assignments).


What approach do you use for "rare" people and what are your learnings?

Michael

[Jingo]

I use keywords for 99% of my tagging needs... and reserve people for those that appear often in my photos (and I want to quickly recall using the People feature).  For the rare folks that appear here and there.. I just keywords.

[JohnZeman]

I have different subcategories under my primary People category.

@Keywords|People|Acquaintances
@Keywords|People|Archives
@Keywords|People|Family
@Keywords|People|Friends
@Keywords|People|Thistle Down Nursery
@Keywords|People|Wakefest

Acquaintances and Archives are where I store the names of people who rarely appear in one of my photos while Archives is where I store the names of people who will never be in my photos again.

[Damit]

I too have been wondering about this.  I want to be a completist but the list can get unruly, especially when assigning people to an image.  It is a catch 22. I am interested to read what others have to say about this.

[mastodon]

I don't use any categorises, but I am wondering. I do not know, how to handle people categories. I am interested in good practices, too.

[Mario]

There are some new (yet undisclosed) features and enhancements for the People View and related features in IMatch 2023. It might make sense to postpone the decision until IMatch 2023 is out. If you plan to upgrade, which would be appreciated.

[axel.hennig]

I'm using just categories for People/Persons. And I create a category for every person where I know the name (even if this category will contain only one image). Approx. 1600 categories under People/Persons and quite manageable.

Category-structure looks like:

Code Select Expand

People/Persons
  A
    Adam, John
    ...
  B
    Brown, Maria
    ...
  C
  ...
So just three levels and last level is "last name, first name" (with that, family members are next to each other or - if not - I create an alias category so that they are next to each other).

[sinus]

How do you handle those people who appear rarely in your photos and you want to have their name associated with the photo?  Do you add everyone to your People database or do you take a different approach?
...
Michael

At the moment I use not the People database, because I do add names a long time for pictures.
Mario has announced above, that he will add some enhancements for the people-stuff, maybe it will be interesting for you, to wait for the new IMatch-version.

I distinguish persons from my clients and family persons. For client-names I write the names simply in the Headline or in the description. On this way the names are inside the file (or as a xml-file), and therefore independend from IMatch.

For family (or good friends) names I  add them as keywords. Also in this case the names are in the files, means independent.
This is important to me. If I would use only categories, what is a very good possibility, the names would not be "directly linked" with the files, because categories are a unique IMatch-thing.

Based on this I create some categories for familiy-members as categories (combined, if they are alone on the picture or not).

This gives me a lot of possibilities, because based on this, I can e.g. create categories for some persons.
Because I have also some keywords, whether a person is alone, in pairs or in threes, I can create sub-cats, if I wish, also for this. I do this, because if I want have a family face for a big enlargement, then it helps not a lot, if this person is in a group of people. For such cases I search then the person, where he/she is alone or in a pair.

I have also added for each family-person the date of birth and hence can count and let write in a metadata-tag the age of the person, when the photo has taken.

All these information, what I do have, I think, can offer the people-system of IMatch, and much more.
Therefore, if I would start again with IMatch, I would quite sure go with this system.
But since I do my stuff, what I have written above, since a very long time, it makes for me not a lot of sense, to go also in the people database.
Although, who knows, if I have more time, it could be interesting to dive into it. 

[mastodon]

It would be nice to have surname and first name in separated fields. It's a neeed to create links between person (some GEDCOM compatible system), that would another god feature, too.

[Mario]

It would be nice to have surname and first name in separated fields.

I decided against that when designing the people feature.
Not all cultures where IMatch is in use have first and last name, or not in that order!

This is why you have a tag, short name, full name, other names etc. You can fill these properties in the way you see fit, IMatch does not impose any special meaning to these fields.

[PandDLong]

There are some new (yet undisclosed) features and enhancements for the People View and related features in IMatch 2023. It might make sense to postpone the decision until IMatch 2023 is out. If you plan to upgrade, which would be appreciated.

Mario - thanks for the "pre sneak peek" teaser.

I do plan to upgrade and look forward to more information as you are ready to disclose - it will be good information to add into the ideas other users are supplying here.

Michael

[Mario]

Damn. Just noticed you are replying to my 32,480th post. Jeez...this deserves a