Have you heard about facial recognition? This feature identifies the same person in multiple photos. It’s increasingly used in photo management software like Lightroom or Apple Photos.
If, like me, you spend hours searching for photos of a specific person to create a photo album, this feature will change your life! It allows you to categorize, tag, identify, and search faces incredibly quickly.
After testing several options for a few weeks, I can now share my objective opinion on the best facial recognition software available. In this carefully selected list, I’ll help you determine which one suits you best based on price, pros, and cons. Note that this selection may be limited for professional photographers who often classify their numerous photos in different software, catalogs, and folders.
First and foremost, when choosing photo management software with facial recognition, I ensure the security and privacy measures are up to par. I also consider other aspects like software performance, interface intuitiveness, and quality of customer support.
So, what do you think is the best facial recognition software? I’ll let you form your own opinion by the end of the article!
Apple Photos, the Best Free Photo Management App with Facial Recognition
All iPhone, iPad, or Mac owners are familiar with and use the free Apple Photos app daily. Since July 2021, Apple has adopted facial recognition to meet user needs and compete with paid software and apps.
Personally, it’s an app I use daily to quickly organize my photos. Identifying people is a perfect opportunity to browse, search, and relive specific moments in your friendly or family life.
Apple Photos uses various machine learning algorithms, executed privately on the device, to classify and organize images, Live Photos, and videos. A key algorithm is facial recognition from visual appearance.
- Free
- Works with videos
- Available across the Apple ecosystem
- Limited to Apple users
- Limited sharing features
Google Photos, the Best Free Photo Management App with Facial Recognition for Beginners
We all know someone who stores their photos on Google Photos and receives yearly memories automatically generated by the app. Google Photos understands that we love diving into our photos and creating memory albums, but sorting memories by person takes time!
Created over six years ago, facial recognition has gained many fans, especially among photo management beginners. In Google Photos, facial recognition works well and identifies people precisely. It’s practical because Google Photos offers other useful features: it accurately identifies and groups people and allows adding name tags for easy photo searches. Google Photos also provides basic organization features like albums, grouping images by genre, subject, or date, but lacks others: photo editing and saving photos in high definition. For a photographer like me, this is a significant drawback.
If you want photo editing tools, you’ll need a subscription. However, for significant edits, I recommend using specialized photo editing software.
- Available on all devices
- Free
- Robust facial recognition technology
- Intuitive interface
- Limited editing tools
- Privacy concerns due to data usage
When you think of Amazon, you think of fast deliveries and Amazon Prime Video, but not necessarily photos. Yet Amazon launched its photo storage service in November 2014, offering safe and reliable online storage for photos and videos.
Its particularity is offering unlimited photo storage and 5GB for videos to Prime members. If you’re not a member, don’t worry; you get 5GB of free storage for photos and videos upon signing up.
Besides providing storage, it recently started using facial recognition to organize your photos. Overall, Amazon Photos offers good facial recognition, making it easier to search for specific people’s photos. For example, you can find “Marie” or “Michel” via the app, website, and even with Amazon Echo Show or Fire TV. In case of an error, name tags can be updated or deleted easily, though this may vary by account. However, to be completely honest, facial recognition could be improved to reach the performance level of Google’s.
Price:
- 5GB of photos and videos: Free
- 100GB of photos and videos: $1.99/month
- 1TB of photos and videos: $9.99/month
- 2TB of photos and videos: $19.99/month
- Unlimited photo storage: $69.90/year (Amazon Prime subscription: includes all other Prime benefits)
If you have more photos than videos and think this storage solution with facial recognition suits you, I recommend getting the Prime subscription to enjoy other benefits.
- Included in Prime subscription
- Unlimited online photo storage
- Basic, less efficient facial recognition
As a passionate photographer, I’ve often found myself with thousands of photos to organize, until the day I discovered Mylio! And no, it’s not a person, but a highly efficient software designed for those who, like me, are looking for a quality solution to store and organize their memories. Their facial recognition technology works very well. It identifies faces with good precision, making it much easier to sort my photos. No more hours spent searching for that specific photo of a friend or family member, Mylio does it for me.
What I appreciate is that Mylio works offline. No need to depend on an Internet connection to access my photos. Plus, the app allows me to add name tags, which makes searching even easier. Mylio also offers very practical management features, such as creating albums to group images by genre, subject, or date. And unlike other services, Mylio saves my photos in high definition. For me, who is very attached to the quality of my images, this is a huge plus.
For photo retouching, Mylio offers integrated tools that are really useful for basic modifications. But for more advanced edits, I can easily use specialized software that is compatible with Mylio.
However, Mylio creates copies of the photos, stored in the cloud, and is not really suited for Mac interfaces. For ecological reasons and to avoid adding clutter to my thousands of files, I decided not to continue using Mylio.
- Face recognition accuracy
- Offline operation
- High-definition backup
- Cost of advanced features
- No advanced retouching functions
- Learning curve
If, unlike me, you’re not afraid of code lines, open source, and don’t care about interface aesthetics, I have the perfect software for you. Digikam is an open-source Digital Asset Management (DAM) software available on Windows, Linux, and Mac and entirely free. It offers many options for advanced image management. You can easily group photos, rate them with stars, tag them, and view them by date.
It’s on my list because it offers facial recognition, accessible in the “People View” tab. Face management lets you detect and recognize people in your photos. It uses a deep learning neural network in the background. First, face detection identifies faces in your images, then automatically associates names with detected faces. For this, you need to have already tagged some faces with the same name for the system to recognize new similar faces.
That Digikam offers this feature is super practical for rough sorting, but the technology is not the most advanced on the market; it is self-sufficient.
- Open source
- Free
- Efficient
- Unintuitive, outdated interface
- Complicated navigation at first glance
A true emblem in the photo world, the Adobe suite has become the most used software suite by professional photographers, for editing, enhancing, and managing photos. Adobe Lightroom follows suit by offering varied and innovative features, such as facial recognition. I tested this feature; it groups photos by faces and then allows adding names to identified people. These names become searchable keywords, useful for sorting and finding images of people according to your needs.
Honestly, although Lightroom’s facial recognition is quite easy to use, its accuracy leaves much to be desired. Plus, the AI model’s analysis of image collections takes frustratingly long, which can be really problematic for those managing large volumes of files. In this regard, to sort and classify your Lightroom catalogs more easily and quickly, I recommend the Peakto Search plugin (also compatible with Capture One), which brings cross-catalog search by prompt, similar, and centralized search.
- Credible and recognized
- High-performance
- Inter-device synchronization
- Low facial recognition accuracy
- Slow analysis of large files
- Unintuitive interface
Which Image Management Tool with Facial Recognition Is Right for You?
If we categorize, we can define different types of users:
- Beginners who mainly take photos
In this case, I can only recommend Google Photos, Amazon Photos, and Apple Photos, the three mainstream, free solutions that are perfect for photo files.
- Photo enthusiasts with a large collection
If you recognize yourself in this category, I suggest complementing Apple Photos if you’re in the Apple ecosystem or Google Photos with Adobe Lightroom if you haven’t already.
- Professional photographers and videographers with IT skills
For this professional audience, I recommend juggling multiple software, likely already the case for most, and using Adobe Lightroom for cataloging, Peakto Search for searching and sorting, and Digikam for facial recognition and modulating its classification with the provided open source.
I sincerely hope to have helped you in your choice, and above all, don’t hesitate to try and enjoy the power of facial recognition!
