Would love to rapid prototype experiment--auto upload of exif/xmp metadata see below . Just retired

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Robert Elliott Richards said: I am going through my wife's trunks and albums of snapshots, scanning them and for her family doing face recognition with Picasa 3.9. I'm saving the captions and face data to the jpg files. This includes the name and rectangles of where the faces show up. Can FamilySearch import any of that metadata directly? or do I need to manually retype the caption (description) and identify all the people within family search? If you are looking for a test case of someone willing to pilot experimental software to get my files with metadata automatically into the memories part of familysearch. Any ideas? I'd love to talk to someone. This could be a huge help as I have literally hundreds of photos to upload over the next years, all of which can have good description and face metatags (not yet done but in process of starting).

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Tom Huber said: Use Google Images. It can search the entire internet, including many family history sites entered by individuals.

The biggest problem with photos of past generations is that few people actually put names with faces and as such, there are thousands of photos out there with no way to tell who the person(s) is/are.

Fortunately, I and my older brother went through family photos that our grandmother had and were able to identify all but a few of the people out of over 500 images.

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Joel Walter Cannon said: I am sitting in the SLC FH Library media scanning floor and unable to find anyone who understands what metadata is or if/how it might be imported into Family Search like you describe. Our situation is common, so I am looking for someone who has advice on what to do (and not to do) when scanning and organizing old family photos.

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Bryant said: When images are uploaded to Memories, the exif data is preserved, but it is not displayed in the user interface on family search.

We do allow for the file names to be automatically set as the titles of the Memories when uploading from the Gallery. There is a checkbox on the upload screen for that preference.

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HintonBR said: @Bryant - Family Search is asking people to face tag photos now - why couldn't or wouldn't we want to accelerate that by ingesting tags that are already present? Any chance this could be considered? As it is the face tagging being done in consumer products is AI assisted and significantly accelerates the tagging. As is many (me included) don't have the time to retag all the photos we might upload...

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Tom Huber said: I agree with the idea, but with Picassa retired and no free replacement (Google images is horrid with respect to what could be accomplished with Picassa) I don't see any advantage at this point in time, especially given FamilySearch's limited resources in enhancing existing features.

Picassa was a great program for helping us identify people in family photographs. Someone needs to duplicate what it did in a new program.

If such a program appears in the future, then I say, yes, implement the ability to use existing information in an uploaded image.

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HintonBR said: There are lots of apps that now face tag. All might not use the same XMP standard, but for example importing people tags from Facebook photos, Adobe tools allow you to face tag, etc... would still provide significant value

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Tom Huber said: I do not know if facial recognition software is something that privacy laws impact or not, but the idea is something that is badly needed by people with a stack of unmarked photographs in some box they have.

Picassa replacements (found via an internet search) miss the point about facial recognition and there are no facial recognition products intended for the general public that I have found (that are either free to use on a local computer or available for download in a common user environment).

The one area I have not checked is a mobile app that makes use of the technology. I know that some smart devices (phones) can use facial recognition as a security feature, but I don't know how far that has gone in terms of perfecting it.

Years ago, I had a computer that had a feature that could be used with a person's finger to open the computer. It did not work very well (for me) and so I never used it.

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Tom Huber said: See my comments below about Picassa...

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Jeff Wiseman said: The Photos application that comes with macOS has a form of this in that it can go through many photos and attempt to identify faces in them based on previously tagged faces.

Anyway, that tagging information is there in the Photo library, but I don't know if it would go with the photos when uploaded to memories

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Tom Huber said: I can see where the graphical identity in the image of the face could have the name that came with that upload attached to it.

I can also see the advantage of such as system, but just doing the upload and saying I'm done is something that less astute users are likely to do. What needs to happen then is that the persons need to be linked to their profile in the massive tree. This is something that only a human can do, considering that the tree now has over 1.2 Billion profiles in it.

In my opinion, given the existence of a system that could actually provide that data (and I still have yet to check for a mobile app) and integrate it into an uploadable image, then a separate routine would need to be built that not only uploaded the image, but also populated the tagged persons in the image in in the list, but then would need to stop and have the uploader actually identify the tagged persons in the massive tree and link them to the names in the list that came with the uploaded photo.

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Jeff Wiseman said: Tom,

So basically, if you want to tag photos offline, you are still going to have to do it online in memories. So the only benefit I can see is that if you have visibility to the tags on pre tagged photos that you've uploaded, it might make the necessary job of linking them to the tree a bit quicker.

And if there are differences in the format of how tags are stored by different programs and the way memories does it, there would then have to be a second tagging of everything after uploading anyway.

So it would seem that it hinges on whether or not there is an industry standard on tagging and whether or not FS uses it on photos in the memories area.

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Tom Huber said: Hm.

With Picassa's demise a number of years ago, it was the only program I knew about that could tag faces in photos. I have explored Google photos but it is essentially worthless. It may be that one of the adobe photoshop types of programs can do something like this, but that can be an expensive program.

It all gets back to having a good program that can do face recognition and tag the recognized face in some manner.

The biggest problem is linking the tagged photo with a person in the massive tree. I'm not sure much would be gained in the process. Even if the image was initially uploaded to a person's memory tab in their profile, if there is more than one person in the image, then it is no better than by going the upload to the user's memories gallery.

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HintonBR said: Even though there is a certain amount of manual work that would need to happen you could still accelerate it substantial by taking the tags on the uploaded items and providing suggested matches to others already in the tree and have a learning algorithm that improved the suggestions based on the frequency that the individual selected the suggested photo face tag to family tree name match.

The alternative of having people do it twice will over time certainly limit the amount of truly tagged content on FamilySearch/FamilyTree which would be unfortunate.

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Tom Huber said: I just did a quick search (Find) in the tree for a single name (no other information): William Almy. I got over 100 returned. I used exact for both the given and surname, just to keep the list focused. Otherwise it would have pulled in over 10,000 possible matches, including all the possible variations of the name.

Just to see if the idea is even practical, pick the name you want to find. Use Family Tree... Find and enter the given name and surname. Select the sex. Now press Find.

If I did that with William Almy and selected Male, I got 10204 people found.
Selecting Female resulted in 9934. Selecting Unspecified resulted in 20179.

If I used an exact match for the surname (Almy), that produced 2079 results.

If I used Bill instead of William (still unchecked), I got 2079 (the system recognized that Bill is a nickname for William and so the same list was produced.

If I did an exact match with Bill and with Almy, I got one result... with no sources, no places, no dates, only the name and sex. For those interested the ID is LTL8-DLP.

Give this a try with some of the names you have in your photos.

Remember, the tree does not search for living persons since the only user who can see the name is the one who entered the name into FamilySearch.

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HintonBR said: Did you just not describe the process for tagging any photo currently regardless of my suggestion? You have to find the person either way. The idea I was pitching above is after the first time the system can remember which William Almy you matched up to last time and suggest that one this time thus accelerating significantly future matching. For older ancestors where you might have one of a person it doesn't help you much, but as we move to using FamilySearch to catalog pictures of more modern day (with the mountains of photos we take) this will accelerate tagging. I also am assuming that we will be able to merge the Living individual placeholders in our tree with the actual entry when the individual dies which would allow the integration of tagging living photos as well.