I have been an Aperture user since I started organizing my photos a few years ago. I purchased a physical copy of it at a store and immediately loved it. One of the features I utilized for photo categorization is the face recognition tool. When Apple announced that they are no longer working on Aperture, I started looking around for a replacement. There are many tools out there but it seems many prosumer level photography enthusiasts preferred Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I took that same path as I can get Creative Cloud relatively cheap and a good friend of mine have been on Lightroom for years.

On Lightroom 5, face recognition is not an option. It basically did many things, some very amazing things, but it can’t detect faces in photos. This translated to an addition to my workflow for photo input. I simply uses keywords to tag the people who are in the photos. This is quite annoying as many tools with less features already did face recognition.

Finally, on April 21st, 2015, the new version of Adobe Lightroom is now available via Creative Cloud and the face recognition ability is part of the tool! Yay!

A quick test drive of it yields some interesting results. There are faces picked up the system that was  never recognize by Aperture. I thought back than that it was because that particular face isn’t photogenic, but it seems that is not the case! Actually the light room face recognition system is so powerful that it picks up on faces from figurines and paintings. As I have a few pictures of my toys and some paintings from the Holy Catholic Church, My faces database contains the following three: Jesus Christ, Holy mother Mary, and Captain America!

On the other hand, the face recognition is so powerful, it is attempting to find faces where none exists!

  
As this gets out of control, more unnamed paranormal faces showed up 😆.

 
Aside from these little annoying things, I remain hopeful! At least I am no longer manually tagging photos!