Face detection / Face manager

[fisketjon]

I've run face detection on the photos in the Relations/Master collection and see that for three similar photos with the same 2 persons in them, the face detection has found one face in two of them (different ones) and no faces in the third photo. I used the option to find small faces. Will running face detection again with a different setting add missing face to a photo where it already has found a face regardless of any face being confirmed?


Regarding face manager. Is there a way to have face manager wait running background jobs until I'm finished with confirm/delete/edit of the displayed thumbnails. It's frustrating when the PC gets less responsive. It would be more effective if I would'nt have to wait. A message often pops up (hiding the save button) telling me that a background task has finished, but the PC is still sluggish as if there are more background tasks still going on. Couldn't "edit" (F2) work as confirm/delete, i.e. update after you click save.

Also, sometimes if I have used both Confirm and Delete before click save, it seems like only the deletes are done, and I have to redo the confirm images again.

[Mario]

add missing face to a photo where it already has found a face regardless of any face being confirmed?

No. Just open the image in the Viewer and draw a box around the face manually. When you run Face Recognition you only have the option to ignore files with existing faces, or re-process them completely.

Tip: If the faces are very small, re-running FR in the Viewer at 100% zoom often helps.

way to have face manager wait running background jobs

Which background jobs do you mean? The Face Manager only starts working when you click on Save Changes to apply your changes. Maybe something else was running in the background? What did the Info & Activity Panel show?

What size of database (#files and #persons) and computer are we talking about? Which version of IMatch are you using? Which performance profile do you use?

Normally, nothing should interfere with your work, except for very short periods when IMatch is really busy doing stuff. Are any slow operations logged in the log file? Attach a ZIPped log file from a session where you experienced slow response times and I can have a look.

[fisketjon]

IMatch 2025.4.4
AMD Ryzen 9 7900 12-core 3.70 GHz - 32 GB RAM
I have tried both the minimal and the balanced performance profiles

I have >58.000 files in the Master collection and 70 persons.

Are IMatch saving something to the server (where I have my Image files) when I click save in the Face Manager, or is it only saving to the IMtach database?

If it's saving to the server it would explain the delays I experienced, since I was running a backup there.

I now have a person with 2.700 unconfirmed faces. After selecting 50-100 of those I click Save and had to wait more than 20 seconds before the view had refreshed and the selected faces disappeared from the list. - and no backup running this time!

[Mario]

Are IMatch saving something to the server (where I have my Image files) when I click save in the Face Manager, or is it only saving to the IMtach database?

Database.

Without a log file (see log file) there is no way to tell what IMatch is doing and what takes so long. Storing a few changes done in the face manager should not take long. Afterwards IMatch will trigger a recluster of all unconfirmed faces to apply your changes.

Which virus checker do you use? Did you configure an exception for the database folder and IMatch?

Not sure if masters and versions come into play here? When I open the Face Manager in a 100K files database, make some changes (confirm, train) and click "Save changes" it takes maybe a second. Clicking close in the dialog closes it immediately and IMatch is responsive again. Background processing continues.

[fisketjon]

First I selected maybe 2 faces and clicked on Delete, afterwards I selected 48 faces in groups (add clicked confirmed for all of these groups). And then clicked save. The deleted ones were gone, but the confirmed was still there.

Confirmed the same 48 faces again and clicked save. The confirmed faces disappeared almost instantaneous, but a second later a black screen except for the title, border and buttons (all faces were gone). About 20 seconds later the faces reappeared and IMatch was ready to let me continue.

BTW: I'm using "Sort by file date & time" because it makes it easier to separate baby faces. 
Could that impact the time IMatch uses to "recluster". I don't know exactly what you "recluster" is doing, but I would prefer that Face Manager just hides the faces that I have saved my actions for and not begin to go through all unconfirmed faces.

The sort order made it possible for me to find an image that I had mistakenly included in an Edit group, because I could look at the file info for the faces before and after the group that I had edited.

Is there a log that says something in the line of "this file has been attached to that person"?

[Mario]

This log was not created in debug logging mode (Help menu > Support > Debug Logging, see log file) so the information is minimal. No unusual 'slow' operations were logged.

There are many warnings about unusual high memory utilization. But 77% of the available memory was already in use when IMatch started, so this is to be expected. Running a memory load of almost 90% is not something you should do regularly. If you use Adobe Photoshop, for example, it allocates 50% of the physical RAM in non-cooperative mode....

There is also a warning that you have not installed a spell checker dictionary and thus disabled all spell checking in IMatch. See The IMatch Spell Checker

I see nothing related to assigning persons to faces, because this is not a debug log.

Reclustering means: After you assign a person to a face or train faces or perform similar operations, IMatch re-evaluates all unassigned and unconfirmed faces to find (better) matches.

When you save changes in the FM, it will trigger a recluster, which is a background operation. It should not interfere with FM or your ability to close it after saving changes. But FM is an app, running in a Chromium instance. Maybe there was a memory shortage (you's system was already out of memory, as I've explained above) and maybe Chromium did not get enough memory to redraw the app?

Reboot your system once. Since Windows no longer really reboots but just hibernates by default, a lot of stuff can accumulate over time. Also, close memory-hungry applications if not needed. Each browser tab can take 50 to 100 MB of RAM, for example. Adobe software are known memory hogs, etc.

[fisketjon]

Even after closing down everything Task Manager reports 63% Memory used, and if I add up the MB numbers for alle Apps & processes in the Memory column it's maybe 3GB.

Hmm.

After a reboot I'm down to 25% Memory used

[Mario]

After a reboot I'm down to 25% Memory used

That's more like it. Probably some long-running background process or similar has leaked memory.

Tip: You can use the Details pane in Task Manager and sort by Active Private Working Set descending to find the processes with the highest memory use.

[fisketjon]

Much better response times now, but I don't have many people with unconfirmed faces left.   Thanks for helping!

Is there a way to disable the small information box that slides up in the lower right corner of the screen telling me that all background tasks are finished? It's hiding the save button.

If I use edit to select another person for the selected faces, and my mouse pointer slides slight after I have clicked on a person link, but before I have released the button the edit window closes as if I have selected a person, but nothing happens to the selected faces. In such a case I think the window should be left open.

Using edit in Face Manager and selecting the person whose unconfirmed faces I'm working with doesn't do anything. I'd prefer that it either told me that I'm doing it wrong, or just confirmed the faces.

[Mario]

These popups normally only show when IMatch is not the active window. Since you are in the FM, which is a separate process, the popups are shown.

You can disable them globally via Edit > Preferences > Application: Show Taskbar information popups. Or, just reduce the height of the FM window a bit.