Marking faces in photos and organizing People view

Elements Organizer identifies and groups similar looking faces. Just add a name to easily access all photos of that person in the People view.

Try the latest Photoshop Elements | Explore Elements product suite

The advanced face recognition technology of Elements Organizer helps you name and organize the people in your photos. To name the people and to view the photos organized by the people tagged in them, switch to the People view.

The People view includes two tabs, Named and UnNamed. The Named tag displays photos of all people whom you have named. The UnNamed tab displays photos of people whom you have not yet named.

You can name the faces that appear in photos to help organize and identify photos based on the people that appear in those photos. For example, if your friend Dave appears in some of your photos, you can name Dave and then sort/view the photos featuring Dave.

In the People view, the different faces are organized by people stacks. People stack refers to a set that has all the photos of the person named in Elements Organizer. For example, if a person appears a total of thirty times in all your media files, the thirty photos are displayed together as a set. The following figure shows sample stacks for John and Sharon.

The face image displayed at the top of the stack is called the profile picture.

As you import your media files, Elements Organizer analyzes the photos in your catalog and groups similar faces together. The time taken to analyze can vary depending on the file type and the catalog type. For example, analyzing a RAW file would take a bit longer than analyzing a JPEG file.

The UnNamed tab displays the profiles of all the people who have not yet been named. You can name these people right here in the UnNamed tab. You can also exclude faces from a stack, specify that a face should not be displayed in Elements Organizer, or merge stacks.

A single click on a stack displays the faces in that stack.

You can view photographs instead of faces by clicking Photos.

To switch back to viewing faces, click the Faces button.

Click a face to display the photo associated with the face.

By default, Elements Organizer does not display stacks that contain only a small number of media files or in which all faces are unclear. To also view such stacks, clear the Hide Small Stacks checkbox.

Click a stack to display all the photos in that stack. To name all the photos in that stack, click Add Name.

You can name all faces in a stack at one go. However, before naming all the faces, you might want to review individual faces in the stack to confirm that the faces belong to the person intended. If some of the faces do not belong to the person, you can remove them. If you want to remove certain faces from the stack, you can do so in one of the following ways:

• Using Not this person
• Using Don’t show again

If the face belongs to some other person instead, click Not this person. The face is removed from the stack and is displayed as part of another stack in the UnNamed tab. You can then name the face as that of another person. 

You can also hover over a face and click the white icon that appears. The face will be removed from the stack. 

If you do not want the face to be displayed again in Elements Organizer, click Don't show again. The face will not be shown again for naming in Elements Organizer.

Use this option when you do not want to name this face at all.

Once you have prevented a face from being named using Don't show again, the only ways to name that face again are as follows:

• Create a new catalog and import the photograph that contains the face.
• Open the image that contains the face and name the face as explained in Mark missing faces in photos.

Once you have removed the faces that do not belong to the person, click Add Names (located just below the stack).

All the faces in the stack are confirmed as belonging to the person you named, and are moved to the Named tab.

When you open a catalog created in a previous version, here is what happens:

• All faces that you had tagged as people names in the previous version are moved to the Named tab as stacks.
• Elements Organizer analyzes all faces that were not tagged and populates them as stacks in the UnNamed tab. You can easily tag these faces as explained in Marking Faces in the UnNamed tab.
• All the people tags are added to the People tags category in Elements Organizer 14 as well. 

Once you have identified faces in the photos and labeled the people, switch to the Named tab to organize the photos further.

If more than one picture of the same person is found, Elements Organizer automatically identifies the best image to use for the profile pages.

You can also manually select the picture for the profile.

1. Move the cursor over the stack till you find the picture you want to use for the profile. 
2. From the Content menu, select Assign as Profile Picture.

If there are more photos than can be displayed in the default view, click the > icon on the last photo or double-click on the face stack to go to the drill-down view where all the photographs in which these faces occur are displayed. You can then create a collage, a photo book, and so on from these photographs through the Create menu.

To view all faces or photographs associated with a person, single click on that person's stack in the Named tab.

By default, faces are displayed. To view photos instead of faces, click Photos.

To go back to viewing faces, click Faces.

All the faces that you named in the UnNamed tab are displayed in the Confirmed Faces section. Additional faces that might be of the same person but have not yet been marked are displayed in the Is this "<person name>" section where <person name> is the name of the person for whom the confirmation is needed. 

To confirm that the faces belongs to the person identified, select the faces and click Confirm. You can select multiple faces by keeping the Command (Mac OS) or the Control (Windows) button, or the Shift button pressed while clicking.

You can also select one or more faces individually and click the checkmark symbol to confirm. 

If a face does not belong to the person, you can remove it in one of the two ways:

• Using Not this Person
• Using Don’t Show again
  
  

If one or more faces belong to another person, you can rename the faces by clicking Rename.

The name you enter can be an existing name or a new name. 

Elements Organizer analyzes faces as you import media files. Based on this analysis, Elements Organizer might find faces in your newly imported media files that belong to a person you have already named. In such cases, Elements Organizer displays a blue icon next to the person’s stack in the Named tab, indicating that new faces that might belong to this person have been added. Click on the stack to display all the faces, and then confirm the faces as described earlier in the Confirming Faces section.

In some cases, you might want to merge two or more stacks (for example because they belong to the same person but have been identified as different). To merge stacks, do one of the following:

• Drag a stack to another stack.

• Select the desired stacks and select Merge People from the context menu.

• Select the desired stacks and from the Action panel, select Merge People.

There can be people in photos whose faces Elements Organizer was not able to identify in the initial workflows. For example, there may be some faces appearing in photos that were taken from a distance or had turned away faces, and so were not recognized as faces of people. 

You can name such missing faces by marking them.

In addition to naming faces in photos, you can also add one or more names to a photo or a video. Use one of the following ways for this:

• From the context menu of the photo or video, click Add a Person and enter the name of the person. Repeat this to add names of more people to the photo or video.
• From the Tag panel, drag the name of the tag (person) to the photo or video.

When you add one or more names to a photo or video in this way, the names are displayed as a generic face icon in the Named tab of the People view. For example, if you added the names Nita and Walter to a photograph by clicking Add a Person or by dragging the tags to the photos, a generic face icon is displayed for these names in the Named tab. 

The reason a generic face icon is displayed is that one photograph or video can be associated with several faces when you add names in this way. Therefore, the tag is applied on the media file as a whole and not on a particular face. 

You can add faces to a group in any of the following ways:

• Select one or more stacks and drag them to the name of the group in the right pane.
• Select one or more stacks and then drag the group name over one of the stacks.

You can switch off face analysis in Elements Organizer, or reset face analysis using Edit > Preferences > Media-Analysis (Windows) or Elements Organizer > Preferences > Media-Analysis (Mac OS)

Elements Organizer automatically recognizes similar faces and groups them in stacks. 

To switch off automatic face recognition, deselect Run Face Recognition Automatically.

Resetting face analysis instructs Elements Organizer to reanalyze all faces in a catalog. When you reset face analysis, all existing people stacks in the Named tab are deleted. Elements Organizer analyzes the faces in the current catalog once again and displays similar looking faces as stacks in the UnNamed tab, where you can name them. 

To reset face analysis, click Reset Face Analysis.