Problems merging people

christie

Hi, thanks for such a useful app!
Today I moved Tonfotos to a new device, which seems to have gone relatively smoothly. My licence transferred correctly, and I’ve scanned in my photo archive.
I noticed towards the end of the scan that quite a few people who had been correctly identified on my old device were split into multiple instances on the new device.
Background: I have names grouped into families. The dupliates always appear in the “Other” group.
I’ve been able to merge most of these successfully, however the more people I merged, the more unstable things became.
In a number of cases, the merged person’s name appeared in the correct group then disappeared without error, causing the previously identified faces to revert to unknown.
When I merged the person, their name disappeared from the list on the left, but the name still had focus and all the photos that were previously tagged with that person were grouped together with the person’s name still showing; however, clicking the person to show more info gave the java error attached - looks like the name no longer existed.

I could clear the error and continue working, and was able to select all the previously identified photos to create a new person. This seems to be working, and new photos are being identified as this person.

I’m reluctant to keep merging - this is frustrating!
Current version details:

Hopefully this is helpful!

Andrey

christie that sounds awful, I am sorry you had to face this issue. This is definitely not how application works normally. If you don’t mind, I have several additional questions:

Did you have dossier file enabled?
Did you save face intormation into files metadata?
Did you use any other software that would write face data into image metadata?
Did you use Picasa in thepast with the same photo collection?

There are many potenital sources of information where Tonfotos can take information about people on the photos, so we need to understand which ones were used in your case.

christie

Hi, thanks for responding.

Yes, I have dossier enabled
Not saving face data into file metadata
From memory, the only photo management I’ve done in the past was with Lightroom, and I don’t recall saving face data. I can see that some of the oldest photos do have tags, so they must have been saved at some point (circa 2007-2010)
Never used Picasa. Some photos may have come from other people who did use Picasa, but not many.

The duplicate names aren’t so much of an issue for me as the disappearing person name when they are merged, as I’m sure you appreciate!
Mainly due to the time taken to re-associate the identified faces with the people again.
Please let me know if I can provide any further info. Happy to provide sample photos with one of the “offending” people if I can identify which ones may have been problematic.

Andrey

christie Thank you for detials.

Based on your desciption I have theory that there is no actual disappearance of the people when you merge. If two persons are in different groups and you merge them, one person will disappear from the group it is now, since it will be merget into person from different group. Could it be the explanation of what you are experiencing?

christie

Andrey That’s what I initially thought, however both the duplicate name and the original instance of the name disappear from the side panel where all the names are listed, and if I look at a photo with a face I had previously identified as that person, the face is still identified as a face, but not associated with any names.

If a person who has been added to a family group shows up as a duplicate name in “others”, Tonfotos recognises that there is an existing instance of that exact name because there is a context menu item to allow a merge, which is not there when there are no duplicates.

Andrey

christie and if I look at a photo with a face I had previously identified as that person, the face is still identified as a face, but not associated with any names.

This is something that goes against the logic of software. Once you scan more photos it can add more people or add more faces to existing people. But it is not supposed to delete person as part of scanning process.

The only case when program can delete existing person is when it was deleted by other application instance, and this information was synced through dossier file to another instance. This is the only case when program would delete person, apart from your direct command ofcourse.

Unless there is some major bug we never heard of before, I would guess all those issues are coming from the fact that something/someone is working with the same dossier file as your scanning is underway. Could it be the case?

christie

Andrey Hm. Unlikely, I’d think!
Photos are on a dedicated external hard drive in a directory structure built by Tonfotos, and this is a completely new system. Apart from Tonfotos, the only other things installed are Steam games. When I’m not actually using Tonfotos, the external drive is disconnected.

Andrey

christie In this case the only explanation could be that we are facing some new and pretty rare bug. Unforunately, I don’t have ideas so far how to idetnify it wihout having full copy of your database. Logs will not help here. Please share any other oddities you might face, that might help.