My photos are already processed for faces and tagged with appropriate names - so too are those of many other people. There are dozens of programs and services that offer this feature. What’s missing from Plex first and foremost is the ability to recognize and use existing tags/keywords ( in EXIF/IPTC/XMP).
Many people have been tagging their photos for years, in my case close to a decade with Lightroom. It’s pretty crummy not to have any of that data made available within Plex. It really makes the photo support not extremely useful, having instead to rely on physical file location or date alone to have any hope of finding many items.
When I discovered that auto tagging had been added to Plex I signed up for Plexpass. I should have looked a bit closer at the detail as I assumed facial recognition/tagging would be a standard feature of auto tagging. I was very dissapointed to find that such a quality product lacked what is nowadays one of the most obvious attractions of auto tagging. I don’t need to know what photos contain fruit or other obscure items , I need to know where are all photos with my grandkids in , where are pics of old uncle Frank etc. I also have many photos already face tagged via Microsoft photo gallery (now defunct) which I can’t add to Plex retaining and/or utilising the tags.
There is also a misconception that if not many people ask for this feature in the forum then it would not be cost effective to add it. I expect that there are many current and potential customers that don’t even realise facial recognition is possible and therefore won’t request it. I’m sure if this feature was added to Plex it would be much appreciated by existing subscribers and likely attract a good deal of new ones.
Agree! I was actually negatively surprised to realise that face recognition is NOT included in the Plex Pass auto-tagging functionality. Auto-tagging without face recognition has very limited appeal, in my eyes.
@elan I found a very quick and dirty standalone oss implementation of this in python a few years ago. I played around with it, and it worked very similarly to Google Photos approach.
Would you consider integrating that into Plex to support facial recognition?
I added a feature request that is related today, but more of a google photos sync that works by album. Albums can be made on google photos based on facial recognition, and if Plex was to implement a library sync, it would technically be able to make albums based on people. I use something similar with pictures of the kiddo from google photos for my Chromecast Ambient mode.
I feel that the functionality is more like Synology Photos. With this tool the matching is done on device and users have the avility to merge photos of the same person. Doing it on device would respect privacy of individuals.
There might be others who don’t care about their photos being transmitted all over the internet to improve matching accuracy and maybe plex could have a slider to accomodate different needs.
One feature that I have not seen in Synology is the ability to circle an area of a photo to identify a face that the algorithm did not decipher.
To complete the circle it would be great if this feature would be tied into the notification mechanism.
This would be a nice feature! Plex already uses Imagga for object identification, and they appear to be a more trustworthy source for this feature than Google would be.
Is there a local-only way to use detection with Plex? I just bought a UniFi AI Key, and thought how awesome it’d be to have AI lookup with Plex.
The other day, I was trying to show someone some recent photo, but I couldn’t find them because I have hundreds of photos and videos each month (I have 3 kids).
