Store people information as tag

Steffi

Hi.
Thanks for this wonderful software!
It is impressive, how good the face recognition works compared to other programs. I’m still struggeling with making the recognized faces available on my phone, though. In other software providing face recognition, the people information is stored within the metadata. I will attach an example of how this is done in digiKam.

In my example, I have a photo of Homer Simpson. Before face recognition, there were no metadata. And after, all the metadata shown in the screenshot have been added. With tonfotos, the only possibility to use the people information in other apps is to select all pictures of one person and add a tag with their name. However, this is quite time consuming and in the “people” view, I can’t see at a glance which faces already have the tag and which don’t.

How about adding the possibility to automatically add the person information as tag? Maybe as selectable setting so users can select if they want to have this behavior or not. I’d love to have a feature like this. I also saw another request about having the information available in XMP, which goes into the same direction.

Thanks a lot!

Andrey

Steffi yep, you are right, there is already similar request here: https://community.tonfotos.com/d/73-store-people-names-in-xmp-inside-image

There are some challenges (like when you rename person with 10 000 faces, you will have to wait for very long time…) though nothing impossible. The thing is we have many different features in our pipeline, and this one does not seem to be most requested at the moment, that is why it was not implemented yet. However after some time, I am sure, this will be added.

Steffi

Hmm, I see. Thanks a lot for the quick reply!

I hope, the feature will be implemented at some point but I totally understand that you implement the most often requested features first.

Highly appreciated that the software is so actively developed!

MacGuyver

Writing Face data to metadata would be a huge feature, especially since Tonfotos seems to be much better at facial recognition than many other programs. It’s quite limiting to have all this time consuming work trapped within the Tonfotos database. This was the first thing I looked for when testing the software. I do hope you consider adding this feature.

Gordo

MacGuyver

I completely agree, this would be an excellent feature. It has my vote.

Steffi

MacGuyver and Gordo: Thanks for the agreement. I have also tried several programs - both on Windows and Android - and Tonfotos currently has the best facial recognition. My phone’s internal gallery also has facial recognition, but the results can neither be saved nor edited as nicely as in Tonfotos… so useless for me, as I would like to synchronize parts of my photo collection between my PC and my phone.

traveller

Keep face and names in EXIF is useful, specifically indexing is time consuming.

If EXIF already marked the image is “scanned” and keep the scanned names, the software can skip this photo and index other unscanned images

Andrey

traveller Just a small correction, EXIF format cannot contain information about faces, this is XMP who does. I know this is all too technical, sorry for being that guy.

Unfortunately, Tonfotos cannot simply trust the information from XMP and do not do its own analysis of the image. As people above confirm, Tonfotos currently has best face recognition on the market, but the other side of the coin is, that face data in XMP is typically written by other apps whose accuracy is qeustionable.

E.s.e.

I join the request to be able to save the NAMES OF FACES IN THE IMAGE DATA. I think that the ideal would be for it to be optional, for example, WRITE THE NAMES IN THE METADATA OF SUCH GROUP, FOLDER, PERSON, X DIFFERENTIATION (similar to what Picasa did). I am very happy with the software, that is why I bought it, I have 120,000 images, this feature is VERY RELEVANT FOR ME

E.s.e.

Does anyone know how I could do, perhaps with the help of external tools + TonFotos, writing the names of the faces in the metadata? in such a way to enrich the image information and image functionality? In Picasa it said to write Faces in XMP… and that seemed excellent to me

Andrey

E.s.e. Can you please share your use case? What you are planning to do with this data after writing it to metadata? Use in some other app perhaps? Which one then?

I am not currently aware about any sofware that would pick up tonofots.ini and write that data into XMP.

E.s.e.

For example, uploading photos to Google with the XML written to force the names, or using another application or service in the future, the good thing is that it would improve the amount of information that is in the image… it gives us freedom.

E.s.e.

I add: thanks to the writing of the names in the file made by Picasa in the JPGs, Tonfotos recognized the existing names, I liked that and it was one of the reasons why I bought it. Now, TonF better recognizes and accepts HECI… the only thing missing is that it can save to a file, I even think that is good when for some reason we lose the INI… or move batches of images from one place to another

Andrey

E.s.e. OK, thank you, so no actual scenario right now, just for future compatibility. I get it. This is why others are requesting that too, just to be sure about future. That is why this is harder to prioritze this feature right now. But neverheless, this will be implemented some day, that is for sure.

MacGuyver

Andrey, your last words about timeline for this feature concerned me and I wanted to get some clarification, if you don’t mind.

Am I understanding correctly that there are two types of data associated with names, the names themselves and the specific face data which sounds like it’s not always stored the same way between applications and could be complicated to implement?

However it seems to me that the most urgent feature needed from users is to store only the name of the person in a tag, and NOT the face metadata itself.

Please don’t underestimate the value of keeping name metadata inside the image files themselves. Most of us are talking about our core photo libraries which in many cases represent decades of photographs. There is little value in spending time creating new metadata in Tonfotos or any other application which does not permanently embed this info into the image file.

I am suggesting the idea of just writing the the person’s name as a tag if that meant that this metadata feature could be implemented sooner.

Andrey

MacGuyver Our development priorities are driven by user demand, and it looks like this particular feature becomes reqiested more and more, so I guess this will be refleceted in our internal roadmap pretty soon. Thank you for sharing your opinion, this helps us a lot to stay on track with what people actually need.

The main challenge with writing faces metadata into files is that it is actually pretty heavy operation, that does require rewriting all affected files, and that is why this may slow down process significantly. This is quite typical in Tonfotos to accept face suggestions by 100 at a time, and then next, and next. Or imagine renaming a person with 10 000 faces in the library (quite typical number btw, this is how much faces I have for my daughter for example). That is why we were postponing this feature all the time, as it may degrade user experience significantly. Not that it is any difficult to implement - we already have all peaces in place to do that, we alrady write tags, captions, etc. This is just another text line in XMP field, not more.

So we have to think about the reasonable method of writing this metada that would not destroy look and feel of the application, that is why it is being delayed. But anyway, this is something we need to evercome and we will come up with some reasonable solution.

E.s.e.

This improvement represents a SUPER CHANGE IN TONFOTOS..write the name in XMP

MacGuyver

Thanks for the clear explanation, Andrey. Regarding the issue of time it takes for the face data to be written, I believe that power users will be more than happy to wait for this activity to complete, especially if it’s something that can be triggered as a separate process in the Tonfotos menu (with a clear time warning). And I say this because those users will understand the vital importance of having clear and complete metadata. It’s what turns a massive, complex library of random pictures into something truly remarkable, scalable, and searchable.

In my mind, this would be a step that a user would trigger at the end of their session, with the understanding that it’s a slow process. In terms of affecting the look and feel of the application, I hear you. In my mind, especially because of the time issue, this feature should be almost hidden in a menu, so it wouldn’t necessarily be that visible, but more of a power user feature. So perhaps it would not even really affect the look and feel, it’s more of a data processing step that the user runs only once and a while, by going into a menu and selecting “yes” on the time warning. (perhaps).

Thank you for being open to this discussion!

alexf

Add my vote to this feature.
I’m currently considering switching from Apple Photos to Tonfotos, because I feel locked in Photos.
But whatever app we chose to use, it’s likely to not survive as long as our life photo library should.
The obvious conclusion to this is that data should indeed belong as much as possible to the photos, in a standard way, rather than to individual softwares which created them.

Akin

+1 for this feature implementation