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github-actions[bot] edited this page Aug 19, 2026 · 4 revisions

Help: People & Faces

LrGeniusAI provides two face-related workflows:

  • People — browse face clusters (persons), assign names, and jump to Lightroom collections per person.
  • Find Similar Faces — select a photo containing a face and find other photos featuring the same person.

Prerequisites

Face data is generated during Analyze & Index Photos — tick Enable face detection on the General tab. It needs the face models on disk; they arrive with the Download AI models button in the plugin settings, alongside the search and species ones. Without indexed face data neither workflow finds anything, and the People dialog stays empty until you have also pressed Cluster faces at least once.

People

Library → Plug-in Extras → People...

What it shows

The dialog shows a grid of persons from your indexed photos. Each cell has:

  • A thumbnail of the representative face.
  • An editable name field, or Unnamed for faces not yet grouped into a person.
  • The number of photos this person appears in.
  • A Library checkbox.

Named persons come first, then unnamed ones; within each group the person with the most photos is first. Every face that belongs to no person — never clustered, or left over by the last run — shares a single Unnamed entry.

Clustering

Detection during indexing finds faces; grouping them into persons is a separate step. Press Cluster faces to (re-)group everything the backend has. The run reports how many persons and faces it produced — reopen People... afterwards to see the new list, the open dialog does not refresh itself.

Assigning names

Type directly into a person's name field. OK writes all edited names to the backend, Reset reverts your edits, Cancel closes without saving. Names survive re-clustering and are used as context elsewhere.

Jumping to a Lightroom collection

Tick Library on one or more people and press Show in Library. With several people selected, the dropdown decides what you get:

  • Photos with any selected person — the union
  • Photos with all selected people — only photos where everyone appears together (the default)

The result opens as a Lightroom collection.

Find Similar Faces

Library → Plug-in Extras → Find Similar Faces...

How to use it

  1. Select a single photo in the Library grid that contains the face you want to search for.
  2. Open Find Similar Faces from the menu.
  3. The dialog lists every face detected in that photo, with a thumbnail and the person's name where one is known. Pick the one to search for.
  4. The plugin queries the backend for photos with matching face embeddings across all indexed photos.
  5. Results are placed into a new Lightroom collection, sorted by similarity.

There are no scope or result-limit options here — the search always runs over the whole indexed catalog.

Tips

  • Better names = better workflow. Naming persons early makes it easy to find all photos of a specific subject across your entire catalog.
  • Run indexing with face detection on all portrait-heavy shoots before using the People workflow.
  • Clustering works by visual similarity, so identical twins or people who look very similar can land in the same cluster. The People dialog lets you rename a cluster, not split or merge one — if a cluster is wrong, index more photos of that person and cluster again.
  • For culling portrait sessions, face data also feeds into the Cull Photos scoring (eye openness, blink detection, face sharpness). See Help: Cull Photos.

Upgrading from a version before the face-model change

The face pipeline used to run InsightFace's buffalo_l models, which could not be shipped with the plugin — you had to install them yourself. It now runs YuNet and FaceNet, which arrive with the ordinary Download AI models button.

The two produce face embeddings that cannot be compared with each other, so faces detected by the old models are not silently reused:

  • They are left unassigned by Cluster faces rather than folded into clusters, which would produce confident nonsense.
  • Photos holding them are reported as needing processing again, so a normal Analyze & Index Photos run with Enable face detection on re-detects them.
  • Nothing is deleted, and names you have given people are kept. As each photo is re-detected, its faces reclaim the person they were assigned to.

So: download the models, then re-index the photos with people in them. Until you do, the People dialog will show those faces as unassigned.

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