On Familiar Faces and Forgotten Names

It’s amusing. I look through Immich and Photoprism and I am struck by how many names I have forgotten, but how easily I remember certain faces. I’m also curious to see how I remember certain names after scrolling through faces yet to be identified.

Decades ago when I was playing with iPhoto and Picasa I knew all these people well, and I saw them daily. It was easy to match faces to names. Now it’s a challenge, because I haven’t seen these people in years, if not decades.

For a while iPhoto and Picasa were happy to encourage us to add names to faces, until people worried about privacy, and the need to deactivate this functionality. It’s about privacy.

Now that we are moving back to to an era of locally installed apps, or self-hosting, if we want to use a trendy term, we can allow facial recognition to know which face belongs with which name. The challenge is to remember the name.

If Facebook was still the network of uni friends and their friends, and our families, and friends of theirs, then it would be easy to remember who A, B and C are.

Instead I rely on patience, and triggers. I might not recognise a face for days or weeks, and eventually I remember because by remembering name A and Context C I find the name from that memory subset.

On Immich I have identified plenty of people, but I have 11,000 faces in total, so remembering all those names is highly unlikely. On Photoprism I have recognised 80 faces out of 999+ faces. Each time I recognise a dozen I end up with 999 more faces to recognise.

In some cases I met the people two or three times, so to forget their name is normal. In other cases I spent years seeing these people daily so I should remember their names with ease.

The forgotten names don’t really matter. The value of Photoprism, and Immich facial recognition is consolidating my name recollection for people that are part of my current life, whether it is people I cycle, hike, discuss books with or more. It would be nice to recognise people by their names, as well as their faces.

Photoprism V Immich

Immich is head and shoulders above Photoprism when it comes to browsing and naming faces. With Immich you can regonise a face, name it, double check, and return to naming other people within a second or two. With Photoprism it’s slow and sluggish. For context Photoprism is slow and suggish on an HP455(need to double check) whereas immich on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 gigs of ram is fluid.

And Finally

When Immich and Photoprism instances crash and I need to repopulate a library most of the work is quick and automatic. I remember the name of via ferrata, and places. It’s adding a name to a face that I find difficult. That’s the part that takes time.

And finally, I do get a sense of accomplishment with recognising a face after days or weeks of trying to remember. Why do we forget names of familiar faces?