New people sharing features

[jrasm91]

We're looking for feedback after releasing some person sharing improvements in the v3.3.0 release.

Try it out and let us know if you have any feedback. In other words:

• questions
• concerns
• recommendations
• bugs/issues
• confusing behavior
• ideas for improvement

People sharing has been actually been very complicated to implement and we acknowledge that it has some rough edges. Please let us know what those are and how we can fix them. We have been iterating on this feature for quite some time now and thought it would be better to release and get fast feedback rather than trying to make it perfect before launch. We think it's probably 80% of the way there, so it should be functional and usable, even if it is still a bit confusing.

It's worth noting that we also do plan to add some documentation around this feature in the future. The hope is that as the feature improves it'll be more clear and require less documentation in the first place.

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FAQs

Do I have to re-run facial recognition?

No. Users can join a cluster group and re-running facial recognition is not required.

Worth noting that not re-running facial recognition just means that you may end up with multiple "versions" of the same person, "John" for example. These will just need to be manually merged. If you do re-run facial recognition you would lose all the names but things would start off much more "pre-merged" than they would otherwise.

I updated to v3.3 but I don't see the "Manage access" button. Why is that?

The button is automatically hidden if there are no other users in your cluster group. Sharing features are limited to cluster groups, which were added in v3.2. Invite a user from the Settings > Sharing section in user settings on the web, wait for them to accept the invite, and then check again for the "Manage access" button.

[matticas]

Hi;

Just spent 30minutes with it. ZERO ISSUES!!! :D

Timeline;

Was on v3.2.2, created a cluster with wife.

Then on 3.2.4; noticed I could suddenly see 'new' people in web only (not mobile), which were 'people' on my wife's account. I merged them then. I never did a facial recognition reset when I created the cluster. It worked for me then, I could look at wife's photos and see people tagged, and vica-versa. Only on web, not mobile.

Now on v3.3.0; went to people sharing, and shared everyone bi-laterally on my account and wife's account. Checked people, everyone I previously merged, were still merged as one. Merged some new people together, works great no issues. Thumbnail / feature photo of each person was still from the original account 'person'. And merge order dictates which feature photo thumbnail stays - very predicable and easy to use.

Scrolled around now; i'm getting matching asset counts for both our accounts on people. It's working fine on both web and mobile (both android).

Thanks a million. Let me know if you need something else tested.

[jrasm91]

This isn't related to people sharing so feel free to open an issue instead. Although this sounds like a setup issue more than anything.

[Solarunit]

I don't care about any sharing features. I want an option to disable all share-related features from web and mobile version.

[jrasm91]

Sure, makes sense. We have the option to disable memories, map, and other features already. We can look at adding some options to disable these features as well.

[Solarunit]

that would be nice 👍

[multi-suggester]

perhaps a feature that can be considered is marking a person as us , and other users would have a person with me , they would get recommended to be shared with me and vice versa for the whole cluster

or perhaps sampling faces from person clusters of user b to see if they match another persons (userb b and c) clusters and recommending share or merges(maybe sampling only the newly shared ones) based on that?

==> person sharing or merging recommendations

[jrasm91]

This thread is about people sharing feature, specifically the ones that were just released.

This is about access to people/faces, not sharing assets with users via albums, etc. There are already other discussions about albums-in-timeline and such.

[JusByte]

It would be nice to have a small indicator to know which people are shared or not so I can quickly tell when renaming or editing that this change will become shared or stay private.

You could argue the "Only change for me" checkbox may act as that signal, but that won't show for a completely unmodified shared person (no birthday/name).

[jrasm91]

Yeah good idea. Do you have any recommendations on where or how to indicate that? I suppose we could show the "shared by" list here somewhere. That still doesn't address the issue of editing via any of the other input name fields

[JusByte]

Yeah good idea. Do you have any recommendations on where or how to indicate that? I suppose we could show the "shared by" list here somewhere. That still doesn't address the issue of editing via any of the other input name fields

What do you think about this? It's relatively subtle and gets the point across that this is a shared person?

Edit: This shared indicator could carry through when you click into the person too (beside their name again). Then I don't think you need to add it specifically to the "Edit person" popup or elsewhere as it should already be clear at that point.

[alextran1502]

This is actually a pretty good idea. I was thinking of having the border of the shared person with a different color, but this might work better

[jrasm91]

Yeah I like this as well tbh

[orrd]

I would like to be able to share albums with friends and family and allow them to see information about the people in the photos (so they can see the name/thumbnail/age), but I don't want to give them the ability to edit my people. I don't think that's possible with this current feature?

It might be that for my scenario, I just need a completely different feature that simply gives us a checkbox when sharing an album to allow viewing of the people information in the album. That may be a completely separate feature than this more complicated merging of people between users.

[jrasm91]

I think this is an additional sharing use case which we haven't figured out yet. Users in your cluster will already see those names and faces, but that's not shown in shared links. It's also not shown for shared album users who are not in your cluster group. I think it would make sense to have an option somewhere to open in to showing faces, maybe a per user per album setting or something

[iam-amazing]

I am also looking for album sharing and once shared, people appear in other users recognised faces and also photos appear in their timeline if they enable it.

[hunnguye]

Thank you for all the work in this feature !

I was so hyped and immediately updated. And it worked just as expected no problems at all. Thank you so much! I also created a test user let him join the cluster group, shared an album and he was shown the faces I shared with him (if the number of faces reached n)

I noticed just these things:

• People groups would be nice. Not sure whether that's a realistic feature. But ideally I just want to share i.e. the 8 people faces, which also belong to the 8 people in my cluster group. For now I was sharing all my faces with all my cluster group members, because I really didn't want to select 8 faces for 8 users. But ofc it would be nice to have a preselected group of faces and share only those with the other cluster group members.
• I want to share my people assets to my cluster group members. They as users could configure their access management to also share their faces with me. However, now if they change something (even just by accident) and didn't set the change only affecting them I, as the og face sharer, get those changes whether I want it or not. It would be nice to not accept incoming changes (by default and or pop up) even if both parties agreed to share.

[jrasm91]

Person groups is interesting, but maybe a bit over complicated. Will have to have a think about that.

Right. So you are talking about sharing people with "read" access or something like that? Read vs write vs admin or similar.

[julienrbrt]

Have you tried removing this test user? I did the same, make it join a cluster, tag some names, merged some users in my main account and left the cluster and now there's some faces missing and error cluster not found on both side. Looks like the only way is to reprocess everything cleanly.

[multi-suggester]

Person groups is interesting, but maybe a bit over complicated. Will have to have a think about that.

I think most common use cases would be family/relatives and friend groups

[hunnguye]

1. The people group might quite be overkill for something you wouldn't do on a regular basis.
   Now that I slept over it, maybe the workflow of sharing could be designed differently and that would already be enough.

Instead of a drop down menu of users and selecting each people to share with them, Maybe (multi) select the people you want to share and then multi select the users you want to share them with ? like selecting assets to share with multiple albums kind of.

2. Yes althouh im not sure whether we need fine grained Access control on which user is able to overwrite my people meta data. A general configuration that I dont want to accept incoming changes would be fine and as a bonus maybe a visual cue, that someone else has different meta data than i have on that person besides the name (i.e. the birthday should be the same)

3. I did not yet remove the test user, and now that you mention it, Im a bit afraid of doing so haha

[julienrbrt]

Will this feature be extended to partner sharing by default? Any reason it wasn't included?

[alextran1502]

time crunch! we have a list of additional improvement to UX for this specific feature that will be coming in the future releases

[hieuvts]

I'm on v3.2 but have not tried the face cluster group feature due to this reason

As of now, this requires resetting facial recognition for all users in the group, in order for the changes to apply retroactively for all assets.

Is it still required in v3.3?
If yes. please suggest me how to do it correctly. I'm thinking of two options

• Stay on v3.2 and add a user to cluster, then hit 'reset facial recognition'. After all jobs done. Update to v3.3
• Just update to v3.3 and add user to cluster.

[tsweizer]

Thank you very much for the v3.3 release, it looks very promising!

I’m still a bit confused about how to use the new people sharing feature with external libraries, though. I’d like to enable it for my external libraries only, so that other users can see the photos from the external library, including the people/face data, but not anything from my personal library. However, I can’t find any selector in the admin settings where I can choose which user accounts should have access.

Am I remembering correctly that the people sharing feature is also supposed to work with external libraries? If so, how can I configure this?

[faryon93]

Thank you for adding this feature, awesome! :)
When removing access to shared people from another user, the people still show up at the other users people's page, but the image cannot be loaded and only show up as blue circles.

[C-Otto]

I encountered an issue that seems to be related to three (!) accounts partially sharing a person. Account 1 shares all assets via partner sharing to account 2. Account 2 and account 3 mutually share a person (A and B). These (technical) persons are different due to vast age differences in the assets, but actually represent the same (human) person. After merging A and B, the leftover (technical) person is still shown with a broken thumbnail, but only in one of the accounts 2 or 3. This might be due to the fact that there are still assets owned by account 1 which have not been merged (due to lack of permissions, i.e. person 1 did not share the person explicitly?).

It's wild, and I hope this helps. I got this fixed after also sharing the person from account 1.

[C-Otto]

This might just be a thumbnail issue, the more I think about it. The previous thumbnail got deleted during the merge, but a new thumbnail wasn't generated for the leftover person (with only assets from account 1).

[eikaramba]

first time experience here.
Assumption before trying share feature: Beeing able to share ALL photos of a person (our kid) with my partner (not using partner sharing functionality because we don't want to share ALL photos of the entire library with each other).

Experience:

1. went to people -> right click on the person -> manage access -> no ability to share anything and confused
   Recommendation: Add hint that you only can share with users from cluster group
2. after some digging, added person to cluster group. now shared person with the other user
3. Other user (my partner) logs in, does not see any pictures of our kid. confused
4. Asked AI to investigate and learned that a shared person does not mean you actually gain access to the photos. i still have not understood what sharing a person actually means (i guess that only means that the face recognition is shared and metadata like name and birthday is managed together).
5. created an album. shared all photos of our kid to that album and shared the album.

Still confused if this is the way to go, because i would have assumed if i share a person with another user that all media of that person is also shared with the other user. could certainly be only a documentation issue, that manage access should include a good explanation/link to what "sharing a person" actually means especially the differentiation between sharing persons and sharing assets and how they work together :)