Today’s Question: It’s quite frustrating that Lightroom Classic doesn’t including AI searching, but I’m wondering about using Lightroom instead of one of the 3rd party plug-ins. I have a collection of old photos that are online but otherwise untouched. I want to be able to find photos with family members and tag those. What would happen if I pointed Lightroom at my collection of old photos. Could I use AI search in Lightroom to find and tag photos with family members? Could those photos with the tags then be imported or otherwise viewed in Lightroom Classic?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Lightroom (as opposed to Lightroom Classic) includes an AI-based search feature, although my experience is that the results are a little mixed when it comes to finding photos of people.
More Detail: While Lightroom Classic does not include an AI search feature where you can search based on an analysis of your images without needing to assign keywords, for example, the cloud-focused version of Lightroom does include this feature. It is important to note that the feature only works for images stored in the cloud, so you would either need to add photos to Lightroom that have not been imported into Lightroom Classic or synchronize collections in Lightroom Classic that contain the photos you want to be able to search for.
Once images are in the cloud and therefore accessible by Lightroom, they can be searched. Just keep in mind that when you initially add photos to the cloud it can take some time before the analysis is complete, so it may take a little time before you are able to make full use of the search feature.
While the search is impressive overall, I’ve had very mixed results when it comes to locating photos of people in Lightroom. In fact, I’ve had better results using the People view in Lightroom Classic to locate and identify people, compared to the cloud-focused version of Lightroom. So, in this case you might consider using the People view in Lightroom Classic rather than the AI search in Lightroom.
Unfortunately, if you add keywords in Lightroom they will not synchronize to Lightroom Classic, even if you had synchronized those photos to Lightroom from Lightroom Classic. Therefore, if you were going to use Lightroom to add keywords to photos, you would need to export copies of those photos from Lightroom to be able to access the keywords in Lightroom Classic or other software. This can obviously contribute to a somewhat inefficient workflow.
