Photo Manager Deluxe - Face recognition

Colua wrote on 3/13/2023, 5:29 PM

Hi,

I have Magix Photo Manager v13.1.1.9 (Trial Version) on Windows 10.

I have searched everywhere, including the Photo Manager Help Index and Search ("Face ID"), the Forum and the Tutorials, but I find nowhere instructions on how to use the face recognition functionality in Photo Manager Deluxe.

I don't understand why this information is so difficult to find :(

It's not intuitive either. I clicked on a picture with the person I want to tag and find other pictures of him, let's call him Tom, and I then I clicked on "Selection", and "Assign people to photos. Find and recognize faces", then I draw a rectangle around the face and indicated eyes and mouth and selected the corresponding person on the right - Tom - and the program started indexing or something. But once it was finished. Nothing happened, I don't have any pictures in Tom's folder.

I don't get it.

I redid the same procedure again, with the same result... none.

Fun fact: When I try to redo the exact same thing now, select a photo and then click on "Selection", I don't have the "Assign people to photos. Find and recognize faces" anymore. Only the "Search for similar photos" is available. I closed and restarted the photo manager, same thing, the option has gone.

I have spent a lot of time without any success so far. Hopefully someone from this forum can help. But I'm really not impressed by this software and am pretty demotivated to buy it :(

Anyway... if anyone can help I'd appreciate. Thanks!

Comments

Donald-Francis wrote on 3/13/2023, 10:10 PM

Same problem. Perhaps the company could provide an answer?

emmrecs wrote on 3/14/2023, 5:19 AM

@Colua @Donald-Francis

Welcome to the Magix user to user forums, so not a contact for any Magix staff, and it is highly unlikely that the company will see your posts, sorry.

@Colua

It seems you are using the trial version of the software. Is that true? If so, you need to be aware that trial versions of ALL Magix software are in some way feature-restricted. It may be that Face Recognition is not fully operational in your version.

@Donald-Francis

Do you have the full, paid-for version?

I will freely admit I have never used the Face Recognition feature in PM so cannot really advise you further. I do know, however, that it does take quite some time to index even one folder. And the built-in Help files are not particularly helpful in how to use the facility since it seems to refer to an option under the Edit menu ("identify faces on photos") which does not seem to exist!

Jeff
Forum Moderator

browj2 wrote on 3/14/2023, 7:34 AM

Hi,

Photo Manager is now about 6 years old. You may want to ask Magix if and when a new version will be released. It is far overdue.

Thus the facial recognition feature is somewhat old technology and not very useful unless the faces are clearly recognizable and fairly large. The program has to go through each image and identify the pattern. This can take a long time with questionable results. Don't expect the program to take a close-up as reference image and identify that person in a long shot of a group, or wearing glasses in one image, not the other, looking sideways, different lighting conditions, etc.

Read carefully the section in the manual about FaceID - Recognizing faces on photos - it is there and I found it easily by typing in the word "face" in Search of the Help file. The program can learn and do a better job but it requires the user to do some work. You go through folder by folder, as far as I can tell. Don't expect the program to go through your 60,000 photos and find photos of you from infancy to old age (I don't think any program can do that).

I used the feature once just to test it. It is much quicker to simply look at the images in photo icon view or list with icon view yourself and tag/categorize the photos. In many cases I had to view the image full-screen just to make sure that I had the correct person.

Photo Manager is not a facial recognition program; it's a photo manager that can do some facial recognition. If facial recognition is all that you are looking for and you are not interested in the other features, then Photo Manager is not for you.

Cyberlink has Face Finder - AI-powered software, find up to 10 people, scan local and online storage simultaneously at the speed of AI, go through online and offline storage and more for only 100$ per year. Then look at the details - they show the process one folder at a time. There is a trial version but I didn't try it.

John CB

Colua wrote on 3/14/2023, 8:16 AM

Hi. Thank you very much for your replies, and John CB or the recommendation, that helps.

Donald-Francis wrote on 3/14/2023, 12:37 PM

Yes, I have the full paid up version

Donald-Francis wrote on 3/14/2023, 12:40 PM

Thanks John. I'm trying Exire as well. Nte many of my pics are scanned prints from pre digital days which doesn't help trying to sort by person.

browj2 wrote on 3/14/2023, 6:41 PM

@Donald-Francis

Hi Donald,

Magix Photo Manager actually does more than photos - video and audio files. Excire only does photos.

Creating an album actually is creating a video that can be opened with Magix Movie Studio, Video Pro X and PhotoStory Deluxe.

As for file management, my videos and photos are all in folders by Video or Picture, then by date with some text appended to indicate the subject.

Excire says that it can find my photos from my beach vacation last year. So can I and easily.

Excire and others claim to be able to find photos of places that you went to. I think that they do this by using the GPS info added by many modern cameras and cell phones. Otherwise, I wish them luck finding out where I was from 1951 to recently. Except for my GoPro, my cameras don't have gps capability.

It all depends on what your needs are.

John CB