How does "Don't automatically assign this person to faces" exactly work?

[axel.hennig]

With IMatch 2025 there is a new option called "Don't automatically assign this person to faces" (see screenshot) within the Person Editor (People view -> select a Person -> Press F2 -> scroll down in Person Editor). But, I don't understand how it exactly works.



What I would expect (how to reproduce):

• Import two images (both without metadata at least without Face/Person metadata), one showing Ben and the other one showing Sandy.
• Let Face Recognition run and both faces are identified.
• Create two Persons (Ben and Sandy) and assign (train) the one to Ben and the other one to Sandy.
• Set within the Person Editor for Ben "Don't automatically assign this person to faces" to TRUE (activate).
• Import the same two images from above as copies (again without metadata!) into the database (four images now in the DB, 2x Ben, 2x Sandy).
• Run Face Recognition on the two new images.
• Now, I would assume that within the People view there is no unconfirmed Face for Ben due to the fact that "Don't automatically assign this person to faces" is activated. But that's not the case.

I can see that in my "real" database, whenever I activate "Don't automatically assign this person to faces" for an additional Person that the absolute count within "Matching Faces" (see screenshot) decreases. I'm refering to the 1089 in the screenshot.



But I would assume that there is never an additional unconfirmed face for Persons where "Don't automatically assign this person to faces" is activated.

Edit: I would like to use this option (activate it) for Persons in my database where I'm pretty sure that I will never see them again in my life, i.e. will never add an image shwoing them. Therefore, there should never show-up an unconfirmed image in People view for these Persons.

[Mario]

The way I implemented that is that I exclude persons with that option from being considered during face reclustering. IMatch may still use the total number of all persons for stats to keep things simple, but when you set the option for "Ben", he should never been assigned to a face automatically. You can still assign it manually, and when a XMP face region labelled "Ben" is imported, the person will be assigned.

Does this not work? Under which conditions is Ben automatically assigned, after you did what?
I've used this for a while now, and do far it worked just fine. Does not mean that this might not work under some conditions I have not considered, but then I would know exactly when it fails.

[axel.hennig]

Yesterday I thought I'm able to reproduce this, but now not anymore. Don't know what changed... have to further monitor.

[axel.hennig]

Forgot to ask: Let's assume that this happens again, i.e. a Face is allocated to a Person where "Don't automatically assign this person to faces" is activated. Will this be logged in the Debug-log file? Then I could share the log-file and further information would be available.

[Mario]

I'm not sure. But if you figure out when this happens, I can dig into it.
I have a set of don't assign persons looking similar to assign persons, and the don't assign persons were never assigned.

[axel.hennig]

Now, I'm able to reproduce this.

Steps to do:

- Create a new database.
- My settings for "Face Recognition", "Face Arrangement" and "Face Annotations" are (see screenshot):



- Import the images from the zip-file (next post due to upload-limitations; images from https://www.freepik.com; License: Free; so hopefully no problem to share them here).
- Select all of them and press "Ctrl+M,F", i.e. "Detect faces and create Face annotations".
- Switch to People view.
- There are now five files in "Unknown Persons" (see screenshot).



- Open the image "Adam_Chris_1" in the Viewer.
- Select the left green rectangle, hit F2 (opens search-box), enter "Adam" and hit again F2 (opens Person Editor), just click on "Save" ("Full name" and "Tag" is filled with "Adam", everything else is unchanged).
- Select the right rectangle, hit F2, enter "Chris" and hit again F2. Activate "Don't automatically assign this person to faces". Click on "Save".
- Exit the Viewer.
- Now, it looks like the following:



- Select Person "Adam" and hit F4 (opens Face Manager). Looks the following:



- Select the first face and hit F2 (opens search-box). Enter "Chris" and click on "Chris". Search-box disappears and there are no faces anymore in Face Manager for "Adam".
- Close the Face Manager.
- Now, it looks like the following:



So there are three unconfirmed faces for "Chris" and I think this should not happen.

Debug-log in next post due to upload-limitations.

[axel.hennig]

Images and debug-log mentioned in previous post attached here (upload-limitations).