People (faces)

What it does

RootMap can find the people in your photos: it detects faces, groups the ones that look like the same person, and lets you name them — then browse every photo a person appears in, or copy those photos into a folder for a project. Face recognition runs entirely on this computer. Nothing is uploaded.

How to use it

1. After your first scan, the People tab invites you to start, with a rough estimate of how long your library will take. Click Start (or Detect Faces on the left any time). Progress shows on the People tab and the Activity tab, with a rough time left once it has measured how fast your PC is going.
2. As it runs, people appear as "Person 1", "Person 2", … Click one to see all of their photos in the Library.
3. Name people. Click Add name under any unnamed person, hover a card and press F2, or right-click → Rename. Names stick across restarts.
4. Who's this? — switch Show to Who's this? to list only people without a name, most photos first. Naming the first few covers most of your library.
5. Same person twice? Type a name that's already taken and RootMap offers Merge into … (or keep both). You can also drag one card onto another; RootMap asks before merging. Merged people can't be split apart again.
6. Duplicates to review. After detection, RootMap merges people it's sure about and lists pairs it's unsure about ("N pairs of cards may be the same person — Review them"). Press Y (same) or N (different) for each, or merge every pair that's Very likely / Likely / Possible the same person in one go.
7. Copy photos to folder (right-click → Copy photos to folder…) copies every photo of that person into a folder you pick. Originals stay where they are. RootMap creates a subfolder named after the person unless the folder you pick already has that name. Copying to the same folder again skips photos that are already there.
8. Delete a person you don't want (right-click → Delete, or drag to the bin that appears at the bottom). Deleted people are hidden, and new photos of them won't bring them back as someone new. Click Deleted people to see them and right-click → Restore.
9. Use Find a person… above the grid to jump to someone you've already named. It ignores accents and capitals, so "zoe" finds "Zoë".

Performance:

• Speed (left side of the People tab) — Gentle (~25% CPU, keeps your PC usable) / Balanced (~50%) / Fast (~80%, leaves headroom). Detection runs in separate helper processes on the CPU so a bad photo can't take down the window; large libraries can take many hours. Changing it during a run takes effect right away: each helper finishes the photo it's on, then restarts at the new speed.
• Pause / Resume — any time. Pause drops the photos in progress (they're redone on resume) and the button shows Pausing… until it's safe to resume.
• Closing RootMap mid-run — detection resumes automatically a few seconds after the next launch (after any interrupted scan finishes). Pausing first means it stays paused.
• Higher accuracy (Settings → Face Detection) — flip averaging on face matching. Roughly doubles that part of the work; applies to faces detected after you change it.

Detect Faces picks up where it left off. Each photo stores whether it was scanned and which detector version did it, so closing the app, pausing, or a crash doesn't redo finished photos.

When we ship a detector upgrade, that version number is bumped. The next run then re-sweeps only photos that had faces with the old detector and skips anything already current.

Troubleshooting

• "N photos are stored online-only" — OneDrive or Dropbox hasn't downloaded those photos to this PC, so RootMap can't look at them. See Online-only photos.
• No faces found — make sure detection finished (Activity tab). Very small or blurry faces may be skipped.
• Same person split in two — rename one to the other's name and choose Merge, or drag one card onto the other.
• Someone disappeared — check Deleted people; right-click → Restore.
• Using too much CPU — set Speed to Gentle.
• Clear All Face Data (left side) starts over from scratch: people, names, and face matches are removed, and every photo is looked at again on the next run.

Related

• Adding & scanning photos · Tags · Filtering & export · Online-only photos