Today’s Question: I was sorting images in the library module of Lightroom Classic when suddenly a funny screen popped up and said something about face recognition. The next thing I know the center screen says “No photos found”. I do not want facial recognition. How can I disable it?
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can pause face detection in Lightroom Classic by clicking the identity plate and clicking the pause button to the right of the Face Detection label. There will then be an indication that face detection is paused.
More Detail: While you can disable face detection in Lightroom Classic, doing so won’t prevent you from switching to the people view by either clicking the button for people view on the toolbar below the preview area or by pressing the letter “O” on the keyboard. It also won’t remove the face regions and keywords for faces that had already been detected in photos.
If you make sure that the Face Detection feature is paused, no new faces will be identified in your photos. If you had associated a name with a photo where a face region was defined based on Face Detection, you can remove that identifier by right-clicking on the thumbnail for a person in the people view and choosing “Remove Face Region” from the popup menu.
In this case the indication of “No Photos Found” means that there aren’t any photos where people were detected. As long as you keep the Face Detection feature paused, there won’t be any face regions added to photos, and therefore no photos will appear in the people view. With Face Detection paused, and therefore disabled, you may notice slightly after performance as well, since Lightroom Classic won’t be busy in the background trying to determine which photos have faces in them.
Note, by the way, that the Face Detection feature can be incredibly helpful in terms of streamlining your workflow for adding keywords that identify the people who appear in your photos. Therefore, if you have photos of people you want to identify, such as family members, you may want to keep Face Detection enabled and be sure to add the names for people who have been detected in Lightroom Classic.
