In the cloud-based Lightroom desktop app as well as in Lightroom Mobile, we now have a People function that identifies people in our photos and allows us to name them.
Watch my video tutorial below, or read on below the video for details on how to use People. (Note that the cloud-based Lightroom was called Lightroom CC at the time I made the video.)
I forgot to mention in the video that if you have migrated a Lightroom Classic catalog with named people to the cloud-based Lightroom, those people will now be displayed – but additional face tagging in Lightroom Classic won’t sync to the cloud-based Lightroom, nor vice versa. Note that this also means that People work done on your mobile devices will not sync to Lightroom Classic!
For best quality, after hitting Play click on the sprocket wheel in the bottom right and choose 720/HD.
Details for those of you who prefer to read rather than watch a video:
Lightroom CC will automatically analyze all your photos, identifying people, and grouping them into individual “clusters” in People view. This analysis takes place on Adobe’s servers, so you have to have an internet connection, and after importing the photos, it will take some time for the photos to sync to the cloud (i.e. Adobe’s servers) and for the analysis to take place.
If the same person appears in two clusters in People view, either click on the … icon, choose Merge…, and then put checkmarks next to those you want to merge – or drag one cluster onto another.
To hide or unhide individuals in People view, click on the … icon in the top right, choose Show and Hide People, and uncheck those you want to hide.
An unnamed person will only be displayed People view if Lightroom CC finds five or more photos with that person. Click on an individual to name him/her and to view photos with that person in them. If you find images there that don’t have that person in them, right-click on them and choose Remove Photo from Person. (It will take some time for that photo to appear again in People view.)
Review individual photos with the Keywording tab open. Identified faces will be displayed, and if they aren’t yet named, you can name them.
Lightroom will inevitably fail to identify some faces in photos. At this point (in Lightroom CC 2.0), there’s no way to force Lightroom to recognize a face (by drawing a face region) – I recommend tagging these people with a regular keyword for now with the person’s name (and maybe an “unidentified face” keyword so you can revisit these when/if future updates allow us to draw face regions.)
Don’t count on Lightroom CC to identify animals – yes, it identified my white dog as a person, but not my brown dog or my cat!
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