People on Photos

Tonfotos makes organizing your photo library easier with its face recognition feature. When you enable the Recognize faces option for a library location, Tonfotos scans all photos to detect faces and group images of the same individual.

You can assign a name to a person you know among the detected faces. Tonfotos will then suggest additional photos of them, starting with the most likely matches. Review and confirm (or reject) these suggestions. Manual confirmation is an essential part of this process and helps maintain the high quality of people's information in your library. To streamline this process, Tonfotos provides mass editing tools.

High-quality portraits, where the person is facing the camera, improve the accuracy of further suggestions. If the photos where the person is marked are of low quality, with faces blurred or turned away, the accuracy of suggestions may decrease.

Face recognition begins as soon as you add a library location with the Recognize faces option turned on. It consists of two stages:

1. Face detection.

   Tonfotos detects faces on photos, extracts features that characterize each face, and stores them in an internal database. This stage is the longest but only happens once for each photo.

2. Face suggestion.

   Tonfotos compares the stored data. It identifies faces with similar features and suggests matches. Face suggestion runs repeatedly when you give the program new information, confirming or rejecting names. It continues even when the library location is disconnected.

Face recognition may take a long time, but you can start looking through the detected faces and assigning names right away.

Working with faces in a photo

In the photo feed, open a photo by pressing Enter or Space, or by double-clicking the thumbnail.

Press CtrlP or click in the upper right to show the File information pane. With the File information pane enabled, Tonfotos draws frames around the detected faces 1 when you hover over the faces on the photo. Detected faces are framed with dotted lines that change to solid lines when confirmed.

If Tonfotos has suggested a detected face for a person, or you have already confirmed it, their name is shown over the frame 2.

You can see all the detected faces in the File information pane as mini-portraits 3. The icons against the mini-portrait show the status of each face:

• For a person already confirmed to be on the photo, you can see their avatar and no additional icons.
• If Tonfotos suggests this face for a person, but you haven't confirmed it yet, you can see 4 their avatar and a yellow icon with a question mark .
• For a face that's not suggested for anyone yet, you can see 5 the mini-portrait created from this image and a red icon with a question mark .
• If a person's face isn't detected on the photo, but you added this photo to their personal album, you can see 6 their avatar with a grey link icon .

Adding a new person

1. Right-click a frame around a face or a mini-portrait in the File information pane.
2. Select Enter person name... 7 and type in the name. Alternatively, select This is... > New person and type in the name.

Assigning a face to an existing person

1. Right-click a frame around a face or a mini-portrait in the File information pane.
2. If this face was suggested for someone, you can see a Confirm <name> command 8 in the menu. If the suggestion is correct, select this option to confirm. Otherwise, select This is <person name> from the suggested list of people who look most like this face, or open the This is... drop-down list 9 with all people in the database and choose from it. You can also select Enter person name... and start typing, then select the person from the list of matching names.

Adding a face that isn't detected

If a face wasn't detected (most likely because of bad photo quality), or if you have already deleted a detected face and would like to add it again, you can ask the program to look for a face in the selected place on the photo.

To do so, right-click in the middle of the face and select Add new face at this location. Tonfotos will attempt to detect a face around that spot, but if the AI can't detect even a low-quality face, it won't be added.

However, you can still add a photo to the personal album of someone whose face isn't clearly seen. Press F2 or right-click the photo outside of detected faces and select Add to personal album to...

Rejecting a face suggestion

Tonfotos recognizes faces very well, but it may be wrong sometimes. Rejecting incorrect suggestions helps refine the recognition and improves further suggestions for this person.

If Tonfotos suggested an incorrect name for a person:

1. Right-click a frame around a face or a mini-portrait in the File information pane.
2. Select This is not "<person name>" 10. Otherwise, you can just select the correct name for this person as described before.

Deleting a face

Your photos may show strangers, whose names you don't know or don't want to store in your library. If you don't want to keep seeing their faces in the suggestions, remove the faces from any further matching.

This may also be useful if the AI has detected a face where there is no human face at all.

To remove a face suggestion:

1. Right-click a frame around the suggested face or the mini-portrait in the File information pane.
2. Select Ignore this face suggestion 11.

If you named all the people you want on a photo, but others are still suggested, press CtrlI or right-click the photo and choose Ignore all unassigned faces 12. This option isn't shown if there are no unassigned faces left on the photo.

Working with faces in the People tab

Go to the People tab to view all people in your library. The photos that include a person are grouped together under their name in a personal album.

By default, the personal album shows mini-portraits with the person's face. If you'd like to see the thumbnails of full photos in the personal album, click in the upper right. Clicking it again switches the view back to mini-portraits.

For each person, you can see all the confirmed photos and some suggestions. Suggestions are offered in batches, and as you confirm or reject them, new suggestions appear.

Confirming suggestions

Select a mini-portrait. To confirm that the face belongs to this person, right-click a mini-portrait and select Confirm <name>, press CtrlEnter, or click .

Rejecting suggestions

Select a mini-portrait. To reject the face for this person but keep it in the library for further matching, right-click a mini-portrait and select This is not <name>, press Backspace, or click .

Deleting faces

Select a mini-portrait. To remove the face from further matching, right-click a mini-portrait and select Ignore this face suggestion, press ShiftBackspace, or click .

Mass editing

Select many mini-portraits at once to mass-edit the suggestions. To select several photos, left-click the first of the photos, hold Shift, and left-click the last of the photos. You can also use the arrow keys while holding Shift, or select all photos for the current person by pressing CtrlA.

When many mini-portraits are selected, you can perform these actions for all of them at once:

• CtrlEnter or right-click the mini-portraits and select Confirm <name> to confirm
• Backspace or right-click the mini-portraits and select This is not <name> to reject
• ShiftBackspace or right-click the mini-portraits and select Ignore this face suggestion to delete the faces

Too many suggestions for a person

When Tonfotos exhausts the most likely suggestions for a person, it begins suggesting lower-quality matches. If you notice that the new suggestions for a person are mostly incorrect, you can ask Tonfotos to set a higher quality threshold for this person. This still lets the best face suggestions through, but you'll see fewer lower-quality suggestions.

To turn this feature on for a person:

1. Go to the People tab.
2. Right-click the person's name and select Offer less suggestions. Note that this option is only available for a person with unconfirmed face suggestions ( against their name).

If you change your mind, right-click the person's name again and choose Offer more suggestions to go back to the default quality threshold.

Strangers on your photos

Suppose you have already assigned names and confirmed all faces of the people you want, but many strangers' faces are still detected in those photos. For example, if you have a folder with photos taken at an event, there may be strangers whom you don't want to include in your library. If you leave these face suggestions as they are, they may get included as lower-quality suggestions for people you know and make your review process inefficient.

Use this simple way to get rid of many unneeded suggestions at once:

1. Go to the Folders tab and select all photos that have unneeded faces on it. Be sure to confirm all the people you want beforehand!
2. Press CtrlI or right-click the selected photos and select Ignore all unassigned faces.

Suggesting new people

Tonfotos can suggest faces that are likely to belong to the same person. Request a suggestion by selecting File > Suggest new person... If you request suggestions several times in a row, the suggested people will probably be different every time. This feature runs a quick match on a random selection of the unassigned faces on the fly.

Click This is... and enter the person's name in the dialog that opens.

Click Ignore to see a different suggested person. Tonfotos will ask if you want to delete all suggested faces. If you click Delete faces they will be removed and never suggested for anyone again. If you click Not now they will be kept in the library for further suggestions.

Click Cancel or close the dialog if you don't want to do anything with these suggestions for now.

Click Go to photo to see the first of the suggested photos, if you are unsure who this is just based on the face and need more context. For your convenience, the next time you open this dialog after pressing this button, the same faces are still suggested so you can finally decide what to do with that person.

Viewing the next person with unconfirmed suggestions

If there are unconfirmed face suggestions for any of the people in your library, the status bar (see the bottom left of the application window) shows a icon. Click it or press CtrlN to go to the first person with unconfirmed suggestions, and again to go to the next person. In the People tab, there is a icon against the names of all people who have unconfirmed suggestions.

Viewing all unassigned faces

Instead of looking through photos one by one, you can see all the photos that still have some faces without confirmed names to them. Select File > Show all files with unassigned faces... Look through these files and put names to faces.

Combine this filter with other filters to review photos more efficiently. For example, you may add a filter to show only photos from one folder.

Undoing recent actions with faces

Press CtrlZ or select File > Recent actions with faces... to see the latest actions you performed and undo some of them if necessary.

In the Recent actions with faces dialog, all faces are clickable to let you go to the photo in question, and the buttons on the right let you undo the action. For example:

• If you confirmed a person, click the This is different person button to revoke confirmation.
• If you ignored a face suggestion and removed it from the library, click the Restore face button to restore the face so it's considered in suggestions again.
• If you rejected a suggested name for this face, click the Confirm person button to confirm that the name was correct.

In other situations, you may see more buttons, but they always have descriptive names, and clicking the image lets you go directly to the photo and make any changes you need.