Phototheca’s face tagging tool helps organize your photos by creating collections of your family and friends in the People view. Phototheca automatically scans photos for faces and lets you identify the people in those photos. The program makes the first pass at this automatically. After the initial pass, Phototheca requires you to review stacks with photos and confirm the subject’s identity. (It’s easy and fun!) After that, you can click the People icon in the Library list to see that Phototheca has grouped your pictures by the people in them.
Once you’ve tagged a few photos of the same person, the app quickly learns to recognize similar instances of a face and will group those images into a collection for each tagged person.
The People view has few switches and options to re-arrange how people portraits appear in this view. The first row of enlarged photos contains all favorite persons. You can select any person and mark a person as a favorite by clicking the Favorite button on the toolbar. Such persons appear in the first row.
Also, you can change the order of how people appear here with a Sort button. Persons can be sorted alphabetically by the first name or alphabetically by last name. Sorting by the last name lets family members appear closer to each other in this view. It’s also possible to sort by the number of photos where a person appears, so people who seem more often in your Library go first.
A control panel at the bottom indicates the status of the facial recognition process. There you can see what progress is and pause a recognition if needed.
Faces metadata formats. Transferability.
There are two standards of how face tags are stored in photo metadata. Microsoft invented its format used only in Windows Photos and Windows Live Photo Gallery software. The second format is MWG(Metadata Working Group) and is used by the rest of the world. When Picasa tags faces, Adobe Lightroom, ACDsee, Apple Photos, iPhones(and dozen other software titles), face tags are stored in MWG format.
Phototheca reads both formats on photos import. So if you tagged faces previously in other programs, that data would be used by Phototheca, and people’s faces and names would appear in the People section immediately after import.