A Tip for Confirming Faces Quickly

Faces isn’t a feature I talk about much, mostly because it’s virtually unusable for me. I’ve stated before that I really want Faces to be project-specific, meaning I can turn it off on projects such as concerts I shoot that have 30,000 faces in the audience! I love, love, love the concept of Faces, but in reality on a Library like mine (and I’m sure many of yours), with so many faces and so many photos, there’s a point where it becomes unusable.

I decided to enable it today however to look for a very specific pairing of people and considering the scope I’ll be searching across, it made sense to take the time to let Faces run and to go through a few rounds of Confirm Faces.

For those of you that have used Faces, this won’t come as much of a surprise — for as amazingly good as Faces can be, it can also make some pretty silly (and funny!) decisions. In confirming my own face, I’ve had to “click to reject” faces of various celebrities, various women, my wife, my kids (ok at least that makes sense), in one case a photo (my photo!) of a sunset (man that’s good analysis, Faces!) and most hysterically, a plant. Well there you go. My face, apparently, resembles a Ficus. A face for radio, as they say.

Anyhow… I did come up with a tip worth sharing. You probably already know that you can click a face once to accept, twice to reject, option-click to reject, drag to accept a range, and option-drag to reject a range. So I was in the habit of dragging or option-dragging over a range when there were more than a few in a row that matched, or click and option-clicking my way through the singles. Tedious, for sure, but more importantly, too easy to make mistakes. Countless times I found myself having to re-click, double-click, crap wait what who is that arghgh-ing my way through thousands of photos. Now I know why Faces thought I resembled foliage. My brain was dirt!

Finally I figured out a faster, cleaner, more efficient way.

1. Scroll so you see a wall of “click to confirm” (Faces that haven’t been confirmed or rejected yet)
2. Click drag over all of them, marking them all as confirmed (green)
3. Now go through and single-click on the ones that are NOT that person, marking them rejects (red) 

I found it to be much easier to have to just click once on faces that were rejects, instead of single-clicking on confirms, double or option clicking on rejects, and going back and forth as I ran through the line.

My time time to clear a screenful was cut in half, or better, by using this method.

Comments

[Ted Lee]

super ... awesome ... tip! thanks for sharing!