Frequently Asked Questions

Does Tonfotos send my photos anywhere?

Unlike cloud services, Tonfotos processes your photos right where they are and never sends them anywhere. Tonfotos developers cannot access your photos in any circumstances. Face recognition is powered by artificial intelligence running locally on your machine.

However, Tonfotos may collect anonymous usage statistics with your permission. Tonfotos also regularly connects to the developer's server to request version updates and manage the license. With a paid version, you can disable usage statistics and automatic updates. Go to Preferences... > Advanced to do so.

Please review our Privacy Policy for details.

Why do I have to confirm faces manually?

Tonfotos recognizes faces very well, but it may be wrong sometimes. That's why it requires you to confirm all suggestions manually, so that no mistakes creep in.

You can confirm as many photos as you wish in just a few clicks, though: click the first photo, hold Shift and click the last photo, then press ShiftEnter to confirm all selected photos.

Why are so many face suggestions incorrect?

Face recognition is not magic, but a technical process of pattern matching. The quality of suggestions evolves through distinct phases as you organize your library.

Phase 1: The Learning Phase

When you start tagging a new person, Tonfotos compares all found faces against your initial confirmations. During this phase, you may receive suggestions of mixed quality. The key to improvement is confirming a set of high-quality, varied photos of the person (clear, frontal shots in different lighting and ages).

Phase 2: The Exhaustive Phase

After you have confirmed a large number of photos for a person (e.g., 1,000-2,000), you will likely have exhausted the pool of high-confidence matches. To ensure no potential match is missed, the algorithm then begins suggesting faces with progressively lower similarity scores. This is an intentional, exhaustive phase.

In this phase, suggestions may include:

• Faces with very faint resemblance (e.g., a child's face suggested for an elderly relative due to similar glasses or hair color).
• Adult faces for a child, or vice versa.
• Even non-human subjects or landscape elements where the AI detects a faint pattern that aligns with the vast, varied dataset of the confirmed person.

This is not a bug or a drop in accuracy, but a sign that the system has completed the high-quality matching and is now performing a thorough, low-confidence sweep.

Phase 3: Taking Control

If these low-confidence suggestions are no longer helpful, you can instruct Tonfotos to stop showing them.

Immediate Solution:

1. Go to the People tab.
2. Right-click the person's name.
3. Select Offer less suggestions.

This action raises the confidence threshold for new suggestions for that specific person. High-quality matches will still appear, but the stream of inaccurate suggestions will stop.

Proactive Best Practice: Maintain Your Confirmed Set

The algorithm's performance depends heavily on the quality of the data it learns from. A common cause of persistently erratic suggestions is accidentally confirming incorrect or low-quality faces.

Before using "Offer less suggestions," consider:

1. Reviewing your confirmed faces for the person. If dates in your photo metadata are correct, they will be sorted by age.
2. Removing any incorrect confirmations: Right-click an incorrect face thumbnail and select "This is not [Person's Name]" or "Ignore this face suggestion". Pay special attention to blurry photos, extreme angles, or pictures mistakenly confirmed early in the process.

Cleaning your confirmed set ensures the AI learns from accurate data, improving the precision of all future suggestions.

See People on Photos for a detailed description of how face recognition works.

Why isn't a face shown in the suggestions?

Tonfotos always shows high-quality suggestions first. Because of this, a face may not be shown in the list of suggested faces for a person, even if it is more like this person than anyone else in the library. When you confirm all high-quality suggestions, more lower-quality suggestions will be shown.

What can I do if a person is in the photo but Tonfotos can't find their face?

Sometimes Tonfotos can't recognize a face, for example, in a very low-quality photo. But you can still add that photo to a person's album:

1. Press F2 or right-click the photo and select
2. Choose the person's name from the list.

The mini-portraits in the File information pane will show the avatar of the person with a grey link icon .