I have a lot of negatives in my catalogue which I have converted successfully to positives. They are mixed in with many positives. I realise that they cannot be used by the Lightroom Facial recognition programme and that I need to export positives to a file that lightroom can use for the purpose. My goal is to add this information the metadata in the catalogue. My question is what is the simplest and quickest way to do that preferably in batch mode or a series of batch modes?. I have more than 40,000 images, and I would like to keep the functionality of the catalogue and be able to export the finished images to an external computer not equipped with lightroom but able to read the metadata. If I can quickly find the negatives where should I place their corresponding positive so that the face recognition can read it?
Thanks
Terence
Wow, that’s a lot of images!
Let’s break this down:
Yes, it is easy to find the negatives. Negative Lab Pro adds metadata to your negatives so they are easier to find and sort through. To find all the images in your catalog that have been converted with Negative Lab Pro, do the following:
- Go to Library module
- Select “All Photos” from catalog (or just specific folders if you want)
- Make sure the “filter bar” is showing (View > Show Filter Bar)
- Select “metadata” filter
- Click on the first metadata filter, and you should see a list pop up with metadata fields to filter by.
- Scroll down in that list to “Image Status” (right above “NLP Version”)
- Select “Converted” to show all the images you’ve converted with Negative Lab Pro.
It just depends. The face recognition will work on the positives, BUT that information won’t be relayed back to the original negatives (so the original negatives still won’t get tagged even with the positives do). You could try to copy the metadata from the positive back to the negative, but you would have to do that one by one, in which case, it may be easier to just go through the images one by one and add keywords.
As I understand it, the usable metadata that gets added is really just a Keyword. So an image that Lightroom tags with my face, just adds the keyword “Nathan Johnson” to the metadata. With all the ways you can add metadata in Lightroom, you should be able to do this relatively quickly. I’m not sure how you have the work organized, or how many different people need to be tagged, but for instance if you had a roll that primarily featured your immediate family, you could select the whole roll, then add keywords for the family members in that roll, and it would apply it to the entire collection. Or if you have a folder featuring a particular model, you can select that whole roll and add his/her name as a keyword.
That’s how I would approach it!
But perhaps someone else in the forum will have a better idea!
-Nate
NateThanks for your prompt reply. As you know one work around for the reversal of controls has been to export the positives and then re import them. Thus I suppose the negatives would be lost and replaced by positives which I suppose would solve the face recognition problem ? Somehow I don’t ;like destroying the data in this way, and I was also wondering whether you could do this to a whole group of negatives and preserve the organisaton. The other way that was suggested to load the positives in the same folder as the negatives on the hard drive.and use the filter bar to separate them… I just don’t know how that would work in practice… Does it make sense to you? I know nothing about the inner workings of face recognition to know how it finds the image it needs. Clearly I can’t manually interfere in its sorting and labelling process.
Going back to your original answer. You have shown how to identify the negatives. What then what is needed would be a command that would get the positive from each of them and put it somewhere it could be read by the face recognition program. Who would know what that should be? My data is organised by year and then events and dates The negatives represent maybe a 1/4 to 1/3 of the total. There are perhaps 50 or more different individuals involved.( That is a gestimate)
Thanks for taking the interest.
Lubber