People and pets

Frameleaf finds faces in your photos and videos and groups them by person. Give a person a name once and you can search for them, browse every photo they’re in, and combine them with other filters.

Open People from the sidebar to see everyone. Click a person to see their photos. A photo’s info panel also shows who’s in it.

• Runs locally. Face detection and recognition happen on your server. Faces are never sent to Frameleaf Cloud.
• Merge and fix. Merge two or more groups that are the same person, or move a face that landed in the wrong group.
• Tag by hand. Draw a box around a face the model missed and assign it to someone.

Name people

Click a face on the People page, or a person in a photo’s info panel, and type their name. Name the people you photograph most first: the People page lists the biggest groups first, and every name you add makes search, memories and AI descriptions more useful.

You don’t need to name everyone. Strangers in the background are fine left unnamed.

On a person’s page

• Featured photo changes the photo shown for them.
• Hide hides their face from the Explore page and the photo viewer.
• Set date of birth shows their age at the time each photo was taken, and brings up their birthday in Memories.
• Merge people combines them with another group.
• Favorite pins them to the top of the list.

Find someone

• Type their name in search, or use person: in the search box: person:Jamie beach.
• Ask in plain words: photos of Jamie and Sam last summer.
• In the filter panel’s People section, choose several people and whether results include All of them, Any of them, or Exclude them.

See Search syntax for the details.

Fix mistakes

• Merge suggestions. When two groups look like the same person, Frameleaf asks. Answer Yes, merge, No, Ask me later or Stop suggesting for that person. Each answer can be undone.
• Fix incorrect match. Move faces from a person to someone else, to someone new, or mark them as not a face of anyone.
• Review faces shows near misses and helps you clean up a person: for each face choose Same person, Different person, Ignore face or Later, which snoozes it for 7 days. You can also move faces in bulk.
• Add a face by hand. Open the photo’s info panel, then under People choose Add, draw a box around the face and assign it. You can also move and resize faces Frameleaf found.

Every correction is kept in a history you can undo, and corrections stick when recognition runs again. Fixing a name also marks the AI descriptions that used the old name as out of date, so they’re redone.

Pets

Cats and dogs get their own named profiles, separate from people. Open Pets under Explore to see them, and a pet’s page to see every photo of them. Pets also appear in Memories, and you can find them in search: the filter panel has a Pets section once you have a pet, and Ask understands photos of Rex.

You don’t need any AI to use pets: open a photo, drag a box across the animal (or mark the whole photo) and choose the pet. Pet recognition is optional: Look for pets suggests photos, and every suggestion waits for your confirmation. Your administrator has to install the recognition model first, and it works on still photos only.

How grouping works

Recognition runs as a background job after upload. On a large library the first pass can take a while; you can watch it in the server’s job list.

A new person is only created once Frameleaf finds a few similar faces (three by default). A face with too few matches waits until others are processed, and if it still matches nobody it’s treated as a stranger in the background. People with fewer faces than this threshold are hidden from the list.

For videos, faces come from the video’s thumbnail only.

For the details, the settings and a step-by-step guide to better groups, see How face recognition works.

Better groups

If you uploaded your library in batches, the first groups may not be ideal. Name a few faces by hand, then ask your administrator to run Facial Recognition for Missing faces so Frameleaf can learn from them. If you haven’t put work into naming yet, rerunning recognition for all faces gives the best starting point.

Privacy

• Named people also help AI descriptions name who’s in a photo. Only names you’ve given are ever used.
• People who appear only in Locked photos stay hidden until you unlock. Their counts only include photos you can see, and their thumbnail is never taken from a Locked photo.
• In a shared space, the names you give people are only shown to you.

For administrators

Recognition settings are in Administration, then Settings, then Machine Learning Settings, then Facial Recognition. Small changes are safer than big ones:

• Minimum detection score (default 0.7): don’t go below 0.5, or you’ll get false faces. Very high values like 0.9 miss real ones. Applies to new detection jobs only.
• Maximum recognition distance (default 0.5): lower it if you have twins or very similar-looking people. Stay between 0.3 and 0.7.
• Minimum recognized faces (default 3): how many similar faces it takes to create a person.

See How face recognition works for every setting, the recognition jobs and a step-by-step guide to better groups.