Today’s Question: I noticed an icon I have not seen before [during a recent webinar presentation]. Near the flags and ratings on your screen there was what looks like a square with four points on each corner with a face in the middle. What is this for?
Tim’s Quick Answer: That button is the “Add Face Region” button, which enables you to manually identify a person’s face within an image. This is a supplement to the people recognition feature in Lightroom, which is something of an automated tool for adding keywords to identify the people who appear in your photos.
More Detail: Lightroom includes a feature that performs image analysis to identify faces within your photos. Beyond simply being able to identify where a face is visible within a photo, it can actually perform a degree of facial recognition, so that Lightroom can detect when the same face appears in multiple photos. That, in turn, can be used to identify the name associated with the face, which will result in a keyword being added for the image.
If you use the face recognition feature to have Lightroom identify where faces occur within your images, a face region will be added automatically to the area where the face appears in the image. That, combined with the keyword representing the name of the person identified by a given face region, enables you to browse by person, which provides a method for locating photos based on the people who appear within those photos.
In some cases, of course, Lightroom may not be able to identify a face for a person. This might be the case, for example, if the person was photographed in profile rather than from the front. When that is the case, you can use the Draw Face Region button to manually add a face region to identify where a person appears in an image. You can then associate a name with that face region, in order to actually identify the person in the image, and add a keyword for their name in the process.
I covered this face recognition feature in an article called “Face Recognition in Lightroom Classic”, which appeared in the November 2017 issue of Pixology magazine. If you’re not already a subscriber, you can get Pixology magazine for half price by following this link:
https://www.greylearning.com/courses/pixology-magazine?coupon=pixten