[Feature] Deletion of Detected Faces

[AllSparkII]

I have searched the existing feature requests to make sure this is not a duplicate request.

• Yes

The feature

TLDR: I am looking for a way to (permanently) remove people from the "Peoples" Tab, without regrouping them or toggling their visibility. Reason being: Strangers fill my "invisible" category to a point where it's useless

I would be interested in a feature that (permanently) removes people from my "People"-Tab. I tuned my AI-parameters to a point, where over 90% of faces get recognized in my library of 42.000 Images. This results in a problem: Over 6k faces are shown in the Tab. I have no interest in many of them, as they are f.e. bystanders at some sports event or just random people strolling through cities in my vacation pictures. Setting higher recognition boundaries or using lower accuracy models decreases these kinds of results, but unfortunately the people I am interested in get recognized worse too. For this, I'd like to remove people without grouping them.

There is a feature to toggle the visibility of certain people. I use it for people I usually don't search for or for people I don't want to pop up randomly (f.e. a deceased loved one). Moving ~5000 unknown people in there would be bad for finding what I am actually looking for and bad for conciseness. Clustering all unknown people into a single Person would result in new pictures to get randomly grouped in there.

Platform

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

[mertalev]

If it's that bad, you might want to reset facial recognition with more normal settings. What did you change the settings to?

[AllSparkII]

Thank you for your reply! My settings are the following: Buffalo L with 0.5 Minimum detect and 0.5 maximum distance. It needs 2 Faces for a person to be created.

I acknowledge that these settings are chosen to find the highest amount of faces possible - but that's what facial recognition is made for, isn't it? Using this technique, I got an increase of about 20 % in detected pictures of myself and some people close to me (compared to G Fotos and Synology Photos). It's not "bad" in a sense of false positives (1 per 3000 created people)! Upping the minimal amout of detected faces sadly won't work for me, as many of my photos are Bursts of Scenes in Sports.

It´s more of a manageability problem. I wouldn't mind going through it once and remove the faces I won´t ever look for.

[mertalev]

The "min recognized faces" setting is your best friend here, but burst photos are a challenge. My recommendation is to set this to 15 and reset facial recognition. This will avoid these people from being created and moreover prevent the blobs of random people you mention. Depending on how many burst photos there are for the same scene, you might need to tweak this number a bit.

[mertalev]

Also general tip that you can set this to a high number and later lower it if need be without resetting, but you can't do the opposite without resetting if you want to apply it to the current clustering. So feel free to use a high number and work from there.

[AllSparkII]

Thank you for tip!

Using the higher "min recognized faces" would result in losing People I'd like to know discovered and still having the burst artifacts. There are two workarounds, one is already implemented:

1. Set the "min recognized faces" high (like 15) and go through every picture in the gallery to manually to retag people lost due to <15 pictures and manually merge Pictures that have faces in them but weren't correctly grouped. These people would disappear in the People-Menu due to the high "min recognized faces".

2. (not implemented, but would be a great feature i.m.o.) Having the "min recognized faces" low (like my 2) and initially use the People-Menu as overview over all recognized faces. Tag the people you want to be displayed, merge if people weren't grouped correctly. Many faces won´t be of any value, but could be removed out of the list with a simple click.

The outcome of both versions should be the same, or at least pretty close. But Version two would only require looking at 6000 "faces", Version 1 would require looking at all 40 k Pictures.
I am all about having the most faces detected and grouped correctly. My parameters were specifically tuned for this purpose. I know and understand that my approach isn't for everybody, and many people would rather have 20 faces not detected than doing so much work. I still believe, that this would be a valuable feature for some people.

[mertalev]

Oh, I agree that being able to delete people would be helpful. But if it got to the point where you have thousands of irrelevant people, it would be a fairly significant amount of work to sort through this by deleting them.

Since you mentioned that you tried a higher value for this setting and it affected relevant people, here's another tip from @aviv926: if you set this to a high value initially and reset facial recognition, then lower it and run "missing" for facial recognition, the result is actually better than using the lower value to start. This is likely because the initial clustering is higher quality and the second pass has a better foundation to work with. It might let you increase your current value of 2 to something a bit higher.

[CyberCreator]

This would be a useful option, I support it.

I would like to make a suggestion. You can not delete strangers, but place them in the appropriate folder with "unnecessary", so that in the future, if suddenly needed, you can get the right face, or if the "stranger" suddenly becomes "familiar", then you will not need to re-render all the photos where his face was deleted. Then it will be enough to upload a photo with this person, and then select his face. (This action should be associated with the previously hidden face in other photos)

[ffchung]

No, you will never need them. When you go to travel or take photo with family, you will have main people you need. but other strangers you will never need them. Like you take photo on the street, more people around. I just want remove them and I dont need review it everytime. And if the case I need them again, I can just rescan the face.

[ffchung]

Also if I delete the person I don't need. It will decrease the chance to put the face to wrong person. I just start to try immich, I put 1/10 of my photo. and there have 5k+ group of person and only around 100 person I need. and some of them with wrong face in person, I need check them one by one.

[ffchung]

All though I want to delete.

Face on the Board.

Doll Face

Stranger mix with my other face.

Stranger

[ffchung]

at this time, I am direct delete record in Database.

I grouped all face I want delete to one person. and delete the person in database. (It will delete all face related person automatically)

delete from person where "id" = '7194cc37-3140-4c58-ad9e-90a0ffd13028';