LR6 Facial Recognition Tips?

I haven't bought LR6 but plan to shortly.

To start off I'm glad they finally added this feature! Before LR was introduced I had used Picasa's face recognition to very good success... I then began using Photoshop Elements which also had facial recognition. Yet, even though Adobe had that technology for years in Elements they never ported it over to LR until now... so while I used it with a smallish collection in the past, I now have a collection multiple times larger to deal with and want to start off on the right foot.

Looking forward to using it, I started thinking of some potential issues that may arise; and figured some former Aperture users or others with experience might have some tips or answers to questions like:

I had already tagged most of my images with keywords for the people within the photos. I have keyword folders for Family, Friends, Celebrities, etc. with only the names under the appropriate folder. When you name somebody using the facial recognition, it creates a keyword tag for that person if one doesn't already exist.

I played with it a little last night. To answer some of your questions:

It would not let me use the same Face tag over again (I'm a David also) so I had to use last names.

I did set up a simple hierarchy to test but I'll probably change it several times to find something that works. I started with three upper level tags that have no people attached (Family, School, Teams - since I'm just a dad w/camera family shooter these are 90% of my recent photos) then you can just move your tags under the headers.

I've also used Picasa and I think it has much better accuracy than Lightroom does. There were way more "false positives" in Lightroom than I ever had in Picasa. It also tries to tag more non-faces than Picasa, things like brick walls, patterns in fabric, etc it will think are faces that clearly aren't.

You can sort your Faces a couple of different ways, which is nice, but I don't think it is dynamic sorting. Meaning if Lightroom has not completed the indexing of the folder you are working on it will not resort based on the new faces it found.

But in general, the performance of accepting/rejecting tags while it is still indexing was pretty poor. I tried it out first on a folder with about 500 photos and it was ok (not great). then i tried it on a folder with 5,000 photos and it froze up a few times. Next time I try it, I will do smaller folders/collections at a time, or let it finish indexing before I start.

I've not tried the facial recognition features, but I did want to touch a bit on how I organize people as I have a large set of families and friends to catalog.

I basically sort people into broad Friends, Family, Other categories.

Under Friends and Family, the next order in the hierarchy is last name and then first name under that.

When marriage has led to name changes, I've done a few things. The simplest is I just move the person to their new last name, although that can also be quite complex if there are a ton of files associated with the name. I've used a thesaurus to assign a person to two last name categories so that the person is essentially tagged for both last names. This is about the same complexity as the simple option above but provides a benefit of being able to find the person under either last name... With face recognition, I'm not sure whether assigning a name would trigger the use of a synonym if available.

Finally, I utilize Smart Collections when I don't necessarily want to have two names associated with the same person or if there would be too many images to bother changing the name or so forth. I can just create one smart collection to grab all images tagged with the person and either last name.

Further, Smart Collections have allowed me to collect family groups to the detail I want.