ACDSee's Biggest Problems Solved in 2023?

[MrJCG1]

The past few releases have failed to correct an oversight that I have notified them of year after year and I hope 2023 now addresses this problem. Can someone let me know if it does before I decide to buy it or move on to another product?

I use the facial recognition tool to assign the names of people to my photos. When the subject of the photo is not always straight on, the recognition doesn't work. That's fine. But, I then use a keyword matching the person's name. I want to then be able to Search on "Joseph" as either a person labeled by the facial recognition tool OR manually assigned the keyword of "Joseph" by me. Will the Advanced Search Function now be able to do this? I basically want to be able to pull up all pictures of "Joseph" whether I identified them or the facial recognition tool did.

In the simplest terms...I want to ask ACDSee to show me all the pictures where the Face = Joseph OR the Keyword = Joseph. And then, when I search for "No Keywords" it doesn't show me all the Facially recognized pictures. Simple stuff here.

This seems like something that everyone who uses the catalog has to deal with. As the manager of a large development group, I know this is a fairly simple fix to a big problem that really holds their otherwise, great product back.

[AliGW]

Yes, you can. and yes, it works - I just tested it.

[MrJCG1]

Thanks Ali...this is better than the previous version but it still doesn't help with the most important part. ACDSee doesn't see the facial recognition as a keyword. So, when I use the "No Keywords" query, I still show a bunch of pictures that have been facially recognized. Therefore, I still have no easy way to determine what pictures do not yet have a "face" OR "a keyword".

[AliGW]

Your requirements were thus:

I want to then be able to Search on "Joseph" as either a person labeled by the facial recognition tool OR manually assigned the keyword of "Joseph" by me. Will the Advanced Search Function now be able to do this? I basically want to be able to pull up all pictures of "Joseph" whether I identified them or the facial recognition tool did.

This is what I showed you. I don't understand how you expect to be able to find all images of someone who has neither a keyword nor a facial recognition tag.

Sorry - I don't understand so can't help. You will have to test it for yourself.

[MrJCG1]

Ali...please don't get me wrong...the information you provided was helpful and it does solve part of the problem. I do appreciate it. I know I am doing a bad job explaining the problem but let me try it this way.

I assume most people take a bunch of pictures, then import them from their cameras/phones to a folder that ACDSee can read. Then ACDSee does its thing, processing the pictures into its database, creating thumbnails, and running the facial recognition. So, let's say it facially recognized 50 percent of the photos. The other 50, I will need to add some sort of keyword to help find them later. So, I use ACDSee's built in "query" (Called Special Items) to show me all the Suggested Names, and then Unnamed Faces. I go through all the photos and assign names to the faces. Now I need to find the photos that didn't have faces so I can tag them with a keyword instead. I use the ACDSee "No Keywords" query (in the Special Items section again) and guess what is returned....All the photos I just spent an hour adding names to. I need some way to search for all the photos I have with no keyword AND no face recognized so I know which ones I have left that have no way to query them in the future.

It would be great if the I could use the new Advanced Search to say show me all the pictures where Face = NULL AND Keyword = NULL. This would then return all the photos without one or the other.

Or, perhaps I'm doing it all wrong. Is there a way you (or anyone else) prefers to do it. How does one load, potentially, a thousand photos and then make sure they were all assigned a face or given a keyword for easy retrieval later?

[Greyfox]

MrJCG1

In Advanced search, you can search for Keyword "Does not exist" which will show all images in the chosen source that do not have keywords.
You can't search for People "Does not exist" (empty field). I do wonder why that option wasn't included.

There is a work around.
1. In Manage mode, in the Catalog pane, expand the People Section, select the first person, then hold down the shift key and select the last person on the list. That wll quick select all of the people on the list. It will also then display all of the images that have named faces in them.
2. Press Ctrl+A to select them all, then press the back slash key to tag them all. (or click on the tag icon in the properties pane)
3. Now you can use your special items "No keywords" and then set the filter to "Untagged". The images left showing will have no keywords and no people.

If you use this workaround, don't forget to un-tag any tagged images before you start, and when you are finished. (Use special items "Tagged" to bring up all those that are tagged, Ctrl+A to select them, and the backslash key to toggle the tags off.

Everyone to their own ideas, but I would prefer to see all of the names added as keywords as well as having faces identified, rather than have some with only faces identified and some with only keyword identification. Within ACDSee having keywords for all could potentially simplify searches, and would be an added safety net if things go wrong. If you also use a metadata preset to copy ACDSee keywords to IPTC keywords, then software other than ACDSee can access all of the names.

Edit: There is a caveat to using a combination of no person and no keyword to bring up those images that did not have people identified by Face recognition, and yet to have names added as keywords, and that is that it will only work if there are no existing keywords. So if you have already added keywords for say "Wedding" or "Niagara Falls" it won't work.

[MrJCG1]

Greyfox,

Fantastic post. I was starting to think I was crazy and that no one else was experiencing this annoying shortcoming in the catalog system. There must be some underlying reason why they haven't added the ability to search for null values in the keyword AND people. I'm going to guess it might be a performance related issue. Surely anyone who has done any UAT testing of this product must know this is something most people would be looking to do.

Anyway...I have a similar work around. I highlight/select all the people...then I select all the returned pictures, and then I assign them all my "Named Person" keyword. It's a fairly simple workaround but, as my database has grown larger, it does take a bit of processing time. It's not terrible but I can see my database growing to a point where it might take longer.

Basically, I manually do what I wish ACDSee did automatically, or through a macro. With the improved search function, I don't need the named person to be the actual keyword anymore since I can search for "John" as a Keyword or a Facially Recognized Person. But,, I would love for ACDSee to assign a default Keyword for all the facially recognized photo. I know something similar is already in the code because you can search for "Suggested Names" or "Auto-Named Faces" why not an "Assigned Name" tag. That really seems like it should be simple enough. Once the Suggested Name is approved or the "Auto-Name" function assigns a face, set the "Named Person" keyword (or give us a choice of keyword to use).

I really wish there was a better way to reach out to the development team or someone who had the authority to initiate a ticket to implement this. We (my company) do this all the time with our clients. They have a request, we provide a solution, develop it, roll it out for user testing, and implement in production (or via a patch).

[AliGW]

Have you raised a support ticket? That's the best way to reach the developers.

[Greyfox]

Have you raised a support ticket? That's the best way to reach the developers.

Yes, a number of them relating the Advanced search

[AliGW]

I was asking the OP.

[Greyfox]

...I have a similar work around. I highlight/select all the people...then I select all the returned pictures, and then I assign them all my "Named Person" keyword. It's a fairly simple workaround but, as my database has grown larger, it does take a bit of processing time. It's not terrible but I can see my database growing to a point where it might take longer.

I initially looked at assigning a keyword, and then alternatively a Category. There didn't seem to be any speed advantage one over the other, though potentially the keyword used up less bytes than the category in the embedded xmp metadata.

But they both have a weak spot, and that is, say you have assigned the keyword "Named Person" to 6000 images in your collection. Later you add 500 new images that have faces that are identified.

Unless you specifically add your "Named Person" manually to the new images (each time there are some), you have to go through the whole process of selecting all of the People again, and then applying the keyword, presumably rewriting the original database entries for the 6000 original images in the process.

The tag workaround I mentioned in my previous post has the dual problems of having to remember to un-tag them, or the next embed metadata run will embed the tag status into the images, and it also sets the embed pending flag, so that has to be cleared after the un-tag..

What I've since settled on is to create a "Saved Search", which brings up all of the images for the People in what ever is the current People list at the time it is run.
I would have preferred to use a wild card to accept any spelling but that doesn't seem to be an option, hence the use of the alphabet.

[Rau]

MrJCG1 How about a solution to the OP's challenge that works like this:
1) FR does its thing - identifies a People name (lists in the Catalog pane) and also defines the rectangle containing said face.
2) System allows a people name to be associated with an image - but with no rectangle. [The keyword approach is similar - but it seems cleaner if we only need "people" to identify....people!]

Then - I can search for "Fred", using the People list in the catalog pane, whether or not FR identified the face.