Facial Recognition / People Tags

[partymonkey]

Hi, I'm considering Paintshop Pro over Photoshop Elements and Lightroom. I am a long time Picasa user, but since Google has phased out Picasa, I really need another piece of software.
I downloaded the trial of PaintshopPro X8 and I really like what I'm seeing, but I have not been able to find information on where and how PSP stores the Facial Recognition data. Picasa did an excellent job of recognizing faces, and a mediocre job writing them as XMP tags.

I've experimented w/ a couple of pictures on PSP X8, but it doesn't look like it will write any People tags to the photo file. It must keep them in an internal database, which is unfortunate for me.

Does anyone have any more information on how exactly PSP handles the People data? Is there any way to write it to the file? Or is the only option to ignore faces and write them as Tags onto a photo, which means you have to do all of it manually?

Thanks in advance.

[MarkZ]

Picasa did an excellent job of recognizing faces, and a mediocre job writing them as XMP tags.

I've experimented w/ a couple of pictures on PSP X8, but it doesn't look like it will write any People tags to the photo file.

Your comment about Picasa writing XMP tags is interesting - in all the years I've used Picasa I've never seen XMP files that it generates.

Picasa does a very good job of face recognition. It does not write the face identity into the file and I could not find an obvious location where the people information is stored so I think it too stores that information in a database.

The only time I've used the faces feature is when testing. PSP's recognition is not as good as Picasa's but workable. If you select someone in the People directory you get thumbs for all the images with the person identified. Double clicking on a thumb brings up the image so you can work with it but for me, the big downside is that there is no indication what the source is, which directory it's stored in. You can find that information indirectly but I would prefer to have it displayed immediately. I've submitted bugs for years about this but no reaction from Corel.

My impression is that other than the recognition capability it is no different working with PS than it is with Picasa.

[partymonkey]

Hi Mark.
Picasa added the option to write the people tag to a jpg file in the xmp section around version 3.8 or 3.9. The option I think is turned off by default, but it lives in two places: in the face recognition settings, there's an option to store the face tag and region in the file, but that only works going forward (new face detections). For already tagged images, there is an option under Tools/Experimental.
It creates the tag under an xmp region (I dont remember the exact name right now), and programs like Lightroom can read them.

I've really like PSP so far, although it seems a bit slow at times. I have non-ideal, somewhat manual workarounds for the face recgnition tags, but I wish they gave you the option to write it to the file rather than storing it in the ImagesDB.db.

[cnthetford]

I'm trying to hunt down the same information for the same reasons. I have a lot of concerns about the way PSP handles it's tagging database. There appears to be no way to import facial recognition data from Picasa. The database does not appear to automatically be backed up anywhere (I have to select a menu option to back it up). I can't find a way to select the location of the database (so I can put it on Dropbox or Onedrive where it would be backed up automatically). I don't see a way to share the database between computers so that my wife and I can collaborated on the tagging of photos from our respective computers.

Picasa was so nice in that regard. We had it set to store tagging data in the .JPG files which were stored on a shared Onedrive drive. Then if either of us, updated tags, it was automatically propagated to the other computer when the Onedrive Sync happened.

[MarkZ]

For databases try C:\Users\YouName\AppData\Local\Corel PaintShop Pro\19.0\Database - but I have no idea if you can do anything with it nor if that would be the one you want. I doubt if it has the tag data because you can delete the database and it is recreated the next time PSP opens.