Apr 222015
Lightroom 6 has been announced, and (finally!) it does facial recognition and tagging! Hooray! It does mean a lot of work I’ve done in migrating face data from Picasa to Lightroom might now be redundant… although if I have to re-tag thousands of photos I’ll still be writing a utility to migrate the data for me. Can’t wait to get my hands on it! You can see the Adobe tutorial here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/how-to/use-face-recognition-to-organize-photos.html.
Apparently this is also the last version of Lightroom that’ll be available as a standalone program, and all future releases will be the Creative Cloud versions. Hmm. Not sure how I feel about that.
2 Responses to “Lightroom 6 Does Faces!”
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Do you know where lightroom stores face tags? Is it in the catalogue or in the photo file itself?
if I get tired of lightroom in future will face tags still be readable by other programs?
Thanks
Hi Federico, and thanks for posting!
Lightroom by default stores face tags (along with any other metadata and develop edits) in the Catalog, however when you select the Metadata | Save metadata to file menu (or press CTRL-S), everything is saved to either an xmp sidecar file (if the file is a camera raw file, eg .nef, .crw etc) or directly into the EXIF/IPTC/XMP blocks in the photo file itself (for .jpg, .dng and other file types), with the exception that Develop edits are flattened into .jpg-type files, rather than stored as a series of editing steps that can be undone or changed. You can also set this to happen automatically by ticking the option Automatically write changes into XMP on the Metadata tab of the Catalog Settings window (Edit | Catalog Settings menu).
As such, this data is available to other digital asset management, viewing and editing programs. Nevertheless you do need to be aware that the word “Standards” needs to be taken with somewhat of a grain of salt, as most every program reads and/or writes this data from/into different parts of the file, as you would be aware if you have read the preceding posts on this thread… With programs such as Phil Harvey’s Exiftool, it can all be retrieved and/or moved around though, it’s just a matter of how much is needed and whether you’re confident enough to take it on 🙂
Hope this helps,
Cheers
Ian