Newby here.
Trying out kphotoalbum for 2 weeks now. Really like it. I think I understand the basics, and now want to do some more advanced things, like face recognition and then use that to tag photo’s.
I watched [1] but my version of does not seem to have the option for face recognition.
Am I missing something? Do I need some plugin?
I searched to find the info, but have failed to find any relevant info so far.
So sorry if this question has been asked before…
@l3u That’s your youtube channel…
@semlraug You are not missing anything. We did have this feature in kphotoalbum, but the face recognition library that we used ended up being unmaintained. In addition to this, face recognition did not save very much time in practice. In the end we decided to drop support for face recognition.
That was indeed long time ago … yeah, back then, face detection worked – a bit. If the people really looked in the camera, with the head not tilted too much. Face recognition also worked a bit … but after all, the work to correct the mistakes and to add what was not detected/recognized took longer than to do it manually in the first place.
After all, the results were disappointing. We didn’t try it again since, with neural networks and AI (the new lord and savior) and whatnot. Most probably, you won’t make this work without selling your soul to some evil company (correct me if I’m wrong!).
Maybe I should remove that video … I didn’t even remember to even have a youtube channel 
The task I have set myself (to retroactively tag all my digital photo’s [from the 1940’s onward], with the names of the people in them) seems almost worth it to sell my soul to a company; so I’m sort of tempted. 
I did find [1] last week, but I don’t doubt you’re up to speed with the open source developments in this area, so this won’t be new info for you.
At least now I understand why I could not find this option in kphotoalbum.
Thanks for your help!
[1] I’m not allowed to add links to my posts, it seems, so I turned it into text by adding some parentheses:
www(.)twine(.)net/blog/top-10-open-source-facial-recognition-library-and-tools/
I don’t oppose to this. I’m only pretty sure you can’t get decent results with some local library. The face detection may work fine meanwhile using OpenCV’s neural network stuff (which was new some years ago, the last time I checked it) and some trained model you can locally store. But when it’s about face recognition, I fear it would be quite difficult to train some local model.
Question is if there’s any good solution for this we could use at all – and if so, if we could implement it in a decent way …
I trust your professional judgement - as a simple end user I have no idea about the sophistication of the local models, nor about the complexities of implementing them.
From watching a lot of scifi I thought it a trivial problem ;-).
I suppose there are several levels of “face recognition”.
For now, I would be happy to just have the possibility to automatically select images which contain (things looking like) faces (or dogs, cats, wizards, etc).
To be able to tag a face with a name and then have kphotoalbum add that tag to all other images containing that face, would be grand.
I’d be perfectly willing to test anything you might come up with, though.
Yeah, it’s actually not completely trivial Just the detection of faces might be something that could actually be added some day. Maybe, I should look at the current state of what we have. The last attempt dates back like 10 years ago or so …
Well, 10 years is a long time in the digital world.
Thanks for considering to look at the current state of affairs.