Getting Started with Face Tagging

Welcome to MediagraphAI face tagging! We think you’ll find it does a very good job of identifying faces. It should save you a lot of time, and help you discover hidden content in your media collection.

The guide here is a work in progress. We’re listening to our clients’ experience and tuning it up as we find rough spots or better work order. We will turn this into a Getting Started Guide once we’re sure we have the best workflows outlined.

Enable Face Tagging

1. Go to Manage > Site Settings > AI Settings.
2. Make sure Face Tagging is enabled. We suggest you start off in Training Mode for a little while. In this mode, Face Searches only occur when manually requested.
3. Scroll down and click to open the Filter Groups section.
4. Click the three bars and drag and drop the Faces item from into a group. We suggest you put it at the top of the Essential group for now.
5. Make sure to click Save at the bottom of the page.

 

Train a face

1. Go back into the front end and find a face to tag. Ideally, this is a well-focused, well-lit person facing the camera directly. Studio portraits are perfect, but are not necessary. Any of the photos below would be good for training the model on a face.
    
2. Select the file and click Run Face Search under AI Actions in the Action menu.
    
3. Double-click on the thumbnail to open the Asset Detail view.
4. Scroll down to open the Faces panel and find the thumbnail of the person you're tagging.
    
5. Start typing the person’s name into the field.
   • If there is a matching Person Tag on the image, it will be suggested before you begin typing.
   • If there is a matching Person Tag in the account, it will auto-fill as you type.
   • If there is no matching tag, a Person Tag will be created when you confirm.
   • If there is a matching Keyword that is not a Person Tag, it will be converted to a Person Tag.
   
6. Hit the return key or click the checkmark to confirm the name. This will set this image as the Training Face for this person. It will also set this as the Main Face, which is the icon for this person. This can be changed later.
    
7. Back in the Workspace, select more photos that may contain this person.
8. Click Run Face Search, under AI Actions in the Action menu.
9. Congratulations, you’ve now made your first face tags! You can run face Search on as many files as you like to find more photos of this person.  The Filter Panel will show tagged faces in the shown set of files. Click on the name to find those files.

Train more faces

Now that we’ve seen how to train and find faces, let’s get experience with more files. We suggest that you pick some more people to train before doing a wholesale tagging.

You don’t need to do these one-by-one. Make a Lightbox of people you'd like to train the model on next. This can be a handful, a couple dozen, or a hundred or more, depending on how easy it is to find a good training image for each person. Start with one picture of each person to help keep track of the process. 

Once you have a group of people trained, we suggest you run the Face Search on a larger group of files, especially one that should have additional photos of these people. Use the Filter Panel to keep track of which files have been tagged.

1. Select all faces you want to train.
2. Click Run Face Search, under AI Actions in the Action Menu. Large batches may take a while to process, but this will run in the background.
3. Double-click a thumbnail to go into the Asset Detail View and start identifying faces using the process described above. 
4. When you finish one, go to the next image in the Lightbox by using the right arrow key. 
5. Feel free to tag multiple people in a single image, but at this stage, avoid manually tagging people who are out of focus, facing away from the camera, partially obscured, poorly lit or otherwise unclear. You may be surprised at how well Face Tagging can find them once trained on a good quality image.

Tips for choosing a training photo

Here are a few tips for finding and selecting photos to train with.

• Note that there can be more than one person in a training photo. Make sure any training face is clear, facing the camera and well-lit. Group shots can be great, but only if the face is not too small. Usually 8 or 10 people, reasonably close-up is about as many as you want in one photo.
• If you have a collection of portraits or headshots, start with these.
• If you have existing tags of people's names, we suggest you start by making sure these are converted to Person Tags. This can speed up the workflow significantly. You can find all your keywords in Manage > Keyword Tag List. Click Person (under Type) to make the change. You can add these tags to the tag tree for an even better workflow.  
• The Tag Tree provides information about a tag:
  • Is it a person tag?
  • Is there a corresponding Face Tag? In this screenshot, you can see that:
    • Josie is a Person Tag with a corresponding Face Tag.
    • Madeline is a Person Tag with no Face Tag.
    • Peter is a regular keyword.

Next steps

Take a look at our next article to learn more about Refining the Training.