Hello Robert,

I'm sorry to read that the face tagging feature has caused you grief & certainly respect your wish to have photo management software that works as intended. You may have already taken steps to make the move, but for the benefit of others:

setting up face tagging on the trial version on a catelog of over 18,000 pictures

Any projects I've face tagged have been far more modestly populated, never more than 5000 that I recall. As you say, even with 18000 photos it "worked well enough". Early versions of PhD [pre-PhD8] did exhibit issues with face tagging, but I've found recent versions to be stable & consistent.

Photodirector 11 would not read the project I created using the trial version.

I have never tagged faces in a trial version project, then subsequently opened that project in a full version, so I cannot offer any advice on that issue. I find it alarming to read of your experience.

Sometimes it would not detect faces on some pictures even though a single face took up most of the screen

I've found similar issues when faces are at the edge & partially cropped. Hence the feature to manually tag faces.

The manual face tagging option intermittently grayed out for no reason

If you have switched to "Show Multiple" view, the manual face tagging option will be greyed out. Switching views fixes that.

I tagged one persion in over 600 photos then all of a sudden the tag disappeared

I can offer no explanation for that, but (having used PhD from the beginning) I;ve never had that happen nor seen it reported.

It is impossible to unlink a face if you made a mistake and associated it the wrong name

Impossible? It would be if Manual face tagging was greyed out, but easily achieved when it's not.



Whatever you decide regarding software choice, I wish you well.

PIX PIX YouTube channel

Thanks for the detailed response. Regarding my statement, "It is impossible to unlink a face if you made a mistake and associated it the wrong name", I was describing a different situation. For example, I created a face tag for "John" and linked his face to it. Later i made a mistake and linked the face of "Bob" to the face tag "John". My understand is that the auto face tag algorithm will now use the faces of John and Bob to apply the face tag "John". This is the relationship I could remove with deleting the face tag John and starting over.

Regarding Photodirector as a whole, I've been using version 5-10 for years with success editing photos. I purchased version 10 to use the new and improved face tagging feature. To be fair, I concluded that it is almost impossible for a pc based face tagging program to compete with the speed and complexity of cloud based solutions.

Thanks again
Robert