People Mode - Blank Context Thumbnails

[Greyfox]

I'm a new user. Formerly PICASA and imported FACE NAMES. ISSUE: In PEOPLE MODE, some (few) faces, when selected, show BLACK (not blank or ?, but BLACK) image frames. When double-click, displays wee in VIEW MODE. Shos Face Names...all is good...BUT...why are these appearing as BLACK, forcing me to double click to see image?

Possibly ACDSee has not yet created the thumbnails for those images.
If it is a large collection and you have only just started using ACDSee, it can take some time..

When you are in Manage mode, do you see any of the indicator shown below at the right hand side of the bottom status bar?


If there is a progress indicator showing, then ACDSee has not yet finished that task, and the task stop being processed if you switch to another mode, and then recommence when you return to manage mode.

Go to Tools\Options\ACDSee Indexer, add all of the folders that contain collection images, the click OK.
Exit ACDSee and leave the computer running overnight, and in the morning see whether the black thumbnails have been replaced

[[email protected]]

I'm a new user. Formerly PICASA and imported FACE NAMES. ISSUE: In PEOPLE MODE, some (few) faces, when selected, show BLACK (not blank or ?, but BLACK) image frames. When double-click, displays wee in VIEW MODE. Shos Face Names...all is good...BUT...why are these appearing as BLACK, forcing me to double click to see image?

[Scott C]

Thanks for the dashboard hint, didn't know how to determine the orphan status. I had 951 files and 0 folders. Now fixed with database optimization, and the question marks are gone. Now to be sure, the orphans could not have led to the question marks since there were 10,000+ question marks but something in the optimization fixed the question marks.

The number mismatch totally makes sense and definitley happening on my end as well. I guess I will add that to my list of things to do. Good thing I retired 2 years ago!

Thanks for all your help, it has been very enlightening.

[Greyfox]

... I do have some people who have a a bigger number in People mode vs Manage mode.

On a first quick check I would have said that wasn't happening here, however I had a couple of people where the face icon in people showed a count of 999+. In one such case (the person was my grand daughter), the status bar in people showed a count of 2902, but the status count bar when I selected her in manage mode showed only 2881. So it has happened here !

Having this afternoon gone through the 2881 photos individually I have found the answer as to why the counts differ (at least here). It seems there is enough similarity between my daughters face and her daughter (my grand daughter) that in a number of cases where they were in the same photo, ACDSee had labeled both faces with the grand daughters name (and I've obviously been a bit slack checking). Now that I have corrected those 21 images, the counts now match.

I have another person appearing in 903 images that showed a count in People of 916. I've been through that lot as well. The problem was in a number of old scanned black and white junior school class shots where several children had been tagged with the same name. That is not uncommon, and I have had to remove some of these in the past. The ones in this case were right near the outer edges of the image, so I probably zoomed in to remove some, and missed the ones near the edge. The count is now 903/904 so obviously I've not got them all. I will have to go through them again later.

It would be great if there was a search routine that could find images where a named person appeared twice in the same image. I might have a look at whether I can do this with Exiftool.

Incidentally, I did find today a photo where ACDSee had correctly identified the person, but also a relatively small photo of him on a wall that was in the shot. Rather impressive!

[Greyfox]

Probably more data than you wanted

No, the more information the more chance there is of identifying the problem.
One question I should have asked. If you select the dashboard , and then the database tab, what are the counts for orphan files, and orphan folders?

I have contacted Customer Support. They have started working with me, but so far no suggestions, still just asking questions.

When they have solved the issue, can you please post back with the details of what was done to overcome it, in case someone else posts with the same issue.

[Scott C]

Sorry for the delay, just realized I didn't tell it to send me emails when I signed up (fixed now).

With a person selected in Manage mode, I see 100% of the thumbnails.

In People mode, the number in the lower right corner matches the number of faces (when double clicking the person) and that matches the number of source images shown (with many being questioin marks rather than the actual photo)

Back in Manage mode, some interesting findings. For many of the people I cross check, the number of photos for a person in Manage mode matches the People mode (and all of them have question marks in the source photo spots). However, I do have some people who have a a bigger number in People mode vs Manage mode. In one case it was just a difference of one but had about half the source pictures with question marks (I mention in case you have an idea that I might be able explore - that person has 216 or 217 images). Another person had 4 more in People mode (476 vs 480 and again, lots of questions marks in place of source photos). In the other extreme, the really big numbers (the four of us in our core family) seem to be off by a fair amount. My wife either has 12,863 photos or 13,294. I am in 6,905 or 6,785. So of the 28 people tracked, 6 are off between Manage and People.

Probably more data than you wanted, but I appreciate the thoughts.

I have contacted Customer Support. They have started working with me, but so far no suggestions, still just asking questions.

Thanks!

[Greyfox]

I see 100% of the faces in the "Show Face Thumbnail" tab, it is the "Show Source Thumbnail" which is missing 90% of the thumbnails.

Oh, I haven't seen that before. My experience early on was with missing face thumbnails, not missing source thumbnails.

Begs the question. "In Manage mode, if you select one of the people involved in the Catalog Tab/People, it should show all the thumbnails of images that have that persons face in them. Does it do that, or are some of those thumbnails blank"?.

In people mode (named), when you look at a particular person, it shows a number on the face thumbnail. That is the number of images that persons face appears in.
If you double click on the face, it should take you to all of the face thumbnails for that person, and the number of faces in the status bar at the bottom should match the number mentioned previously. And if you select "Show source image thumbnails" it should show that number of source image thumbnails - obviously in your case a fair percentage of these are not showing properly.

Back in Manage mode, if you select the same person in the Catalog Tab/People section, then the count of the number of thumbnails shown will at the left end of the status bar, and it should be the same number as was shown in the People mode, I think it may be important to establish whether all of those thumbnails are present in Manage mode.

If I embed the metadata and then rerun the face detection (from scratch), will it use that metadata when considering faces?

No, I don't believe so. The reason for embedding the metadata is so that if the database has to be rebuilt at any time, a Tools/Database/Catalog files will read all of the metadata, including the face metadata, back into the new database and thus saves having to start from scratch again.

I think this issue ought to be raised with ACDSee Support. https://www.acdsee.com/en/support/

[Scott C]

I see 100% of the faces in the "Show Face Thumbail" tab, it is the "Show Source Thumbnail" which is missing 90% of the thumbnails. Since we are talking about 100,000 pictures (and some of the faces have "confirmed"faces over 10,000 I will not likely be starting from scratch. If I embed the metadata and then rerun the face detection (from scratch), will it use that metadata when considering faces?

BTW, I did try 1-4 above - it did not fix the problem. Interstingly, it took quite a few attempts. When I ran the redetect faces, it was quite good at getting the detection right (and thus it didn't ask me and didn't show back up in the people tab lower frame).

[Greyfox]

I have this exact thing as well (most but not all of the context pictures in people mode) have the question mark face. No Picasa use by me and it is a brand new data base (less than 2 weeks old). I did have the thumbnails at one point, and a few days ago they disappeared. When I go to View mode, the picture is there as the thumbnail i the filmstrip. I did not manually draw any faces. I have not tried redetect yet, but agree it sounds like it would create a lot of work.

Select one of the blank (Question mark) faces in people mode, then click on View. That will open the photo in view mode.
Have "Show Face Outlines" enabled. You will perhaps then see the Box around the face in the image, with the name

If you don't have the Face Detection Pane showing, go to the Panes menu and select Face Detection.
You may now see the face thumbnail in the face detection pane.

1. Use Tools/Face Detection/Remove Faces to remove the detected faces. You should now see the "Question Marked face" thumbnail in the Face Detection Pane.
2. Then use Tools/Face Detection/ReDetect Faces. That should re-detect the faces in that image, and show the thumbnail in the Face Detection Pane.
3. Click on Manage Mode which should then show the image thumnail selected
4. Right Click, select Metadata/Embed ACDSee metadata.

If after doing step 2 above, no faces are detected, then what ever faces are in the image don't meet the criteria for automatic recognition. You can draw the box manually around the face and enter the name. Then continue with steps 3 and 4. M

Manually entered faces are not used in auto identification of other faces.

If that fixes the problem with that image, then:-

If the number of "Question mark" face icons is relatively small, you could opt to carry out the above for each of them.
If there are a large number, that probably isn't an attractive option, however I would not jump straight into doing a global rerun recognition.

In Tools/Options/Face Detection, the "Rerun Recognition" will remove all previously auto applied face names, and will re-run recognition on those images. It won't change any manually applied names (and hence won't fix this issue if the faces in question were manually done), but will also perhaps result in you having a lot of correction work to do.

A method I have used is to select each of the "Question mark" icons, click on view and then tag the image. Repeat until you have all of the images involved tagged.
Then in Manage mode, use Catalog pane/ Special items/Tagged to display, then Ctrl+A to select all of the tagged images, then run Tools/:Face Detection/Remove Faces, then Re-Detect faces,

There may be a few images where it isn't able to detect faces, so you may need to run them through view mode after, but at least you would only be dealing with the affected ones, not the bulk of the collection.

Don't forget to re do the embedding of the ACDSee metadata after removing the Tag

[Scott C]

I have this exact thing as well (most but not all of the context pictures in people mode) have the question mark face. No Picasa use by me and it is a brand new data base (less than 2 weeks old). I did have the thumbnails at one point, and a few days ago they disappeared. When I go to View mode, the picture is there as the thumbnail i the filmstrip. I did not manually draw any faces. I have not tried redetect yet, but agree it sounds like it would create a lot of work.

[RAK]

FIXED IT. ACDSee built a new database and I then cataloged the Picasa-originated part of my collection using ACDSee face data. No longer have the blank context thumbnails in People mode.

[RAK]

Yes as to the appearance of the blank thumbnail.

As to your theory, thanks for the thought but it's doesn't match my situation. First recall from above that my problem is only with the context thumbnail (full image view) in the People mode. Apart from that, the import from Picasa worked just fine in that:

1. All my Picasa people were added
2. I got all their "head shot" thumbnails correctly (even if Picasa had a few of those off-kilter in position e.g., if Picasa had it on a 'weird' space, ACDSee still registers it as that 'weird' space.)
3. I can do all the ACDSee people / face managing on everything, apart from getting actual context thumbnails in People mode. (With corresponding manual workflow impact.)
4. I do get accurate full image thumbnails of those same images in Manage and View Mode.
5. I've tried the Remove & Redetect as well as Remove and Manual add without it fixing the problem.

I've been thinking about rebuilding the database, this time with importing ACDSee face data, since in my theory the Picasa originated faces should now be embedded as ACDSee metadata. (I've done the "Embed" thing.)

Ironically, as I tried to start ACDSee just now for the first time today, ACDSee is telling me in effect that my database is toast. Guess I'll get to test my theory.

[Greyfox]

RAK

Is this the type of blank image you are referring to?.



To get the example above, In view mode, I manually drew the "face box" around the head of the subject and then named it. Doing so created an entry for the person, and the face detection with the name "looks" OK when the image is shown in View mode, but the co-ordinates for the face "box" obviously do not have within them a "proper face", and results in the blank face thumbnail in People mode. If I delete that face and then run face detection on the image it shows as no faces found.

It may be that the face co-ordinates from the Picasa images you imported where this occurs for some reason in ACDSee do not contain what ACDSee needs to see it as a proper face. So if you take one of those images and and in View mode run Tools>Face Detection>Remove Faces, the Run Tools>Face Detection>Redetect Faces it should either result in No faces found, or detect the face and either automatically name it, or allow you to name it. And that should then remove the problem from that image.

You could run a re-detect on your entire collection, but I would expect that would result in a large amount of work to get all the faces correctly named.
The alternative is to perhaps do a few images at a time when you have some spare time.

[RAK]

It seems that my Picasa imports (with Picasa embedded face data) is the common denominator to the blank context thumbnails in People Mode. About 15% of my images in ACDSee come from my film scanning project that I never put into Picasa and all of those do have good context thumbnails in People mode. By contrast, a spot check of files with imported Picasa data shows none with good context thumbnails in People mode. Origin of all those files is quite varied, so I can't attribute any blame on the original source files.

In a few of the Picasa originated files I tried removing faces and redetecting them in ACDSee. In one case I got a good context thumbnail back in People mode, but mostly that didn't work. Even if it did, I sure wouldn't want to go through that for my entire collection.

Given that everything else with respect to People / Faces works works apart from the blank context thumbnails, I chalk this up to a "bug / feature" of ACDSee that I can live with, but hope that the developers can take a look under the hood for a fix.

ACDSee Commander is whitelisted in my Windows Defender firewall.

[Regor250]

I am wondering if this could have anything to do with the Picasa import. Have you tried selecting a bunch of troublesome files, clearing the face data, and running face detection and recognition again on these files? Do they have embedded metadata? What is the source of these files? Do they have anything in common? Did you allow ACDSee Ultimate through your virus check, all sort of funny things happen if you don't (see sticky thread). Note that faces can be viewed grouped (same people all together) and ungrouped.