A few details to better understand the situation:
I have more than 150,000 photos dating back to the early 2000s.
I have more than 5,000 face clusters (groups), of which 332 are named.
On June 14, I noticed that face clustering was stuck at 294,000% and would not stop. The issue was resolved with the help of the support team, but I now suspect that some data may have become corrupted.
Recently, I noticed that one face cluster contains many photos that do not belong there: girls, boys, young people, older people, with no apparent similarity between them. Let’s call this group Joe. Joe is not a family member and should have no more than 100 photos associated with him.
I thought the easiest way to fix the issue would be to delete the Joe cluster and recreate it later. I didn’t want to manually correct 3,000+ photos, many of which contained multiple incorrect recognitions of Joe.
Unfortunately, after deleting the cluster, it did not remain as an “Unknown” group. Instead, it appears to have been merged with another person, let’s call her Marie. I can’t be certain that exactly the same faces were reassigned to Marie, but it certainly looks that way.
I have invested a lot of manual work into organizing these face groups, so I would prefer not to start over from scratch.
Do you think removing photos year by year from the QuMagie library and letting it rebuild the face database could help? I would lose some metadata and manual corrections, but that would still be better than losing everything.
Do you have any other suggestions?
For example, the oldest photo with an incorrect match involving Marie dates back to 2020. Joe is actually in the photo, but it is now labeled as Marie. Before I deleted the Joe cluster, this photo was recognized correctly.
The real mess seems to start in 2022. From that point onward, a large number of different people are being recognized as Marie. I’m considering moving all photos from 2022 onward out of the QuMagie library, manually correcting the older photos involving Joe and Marie, and then gradually adding the newer photos back in batches.
If my understanding of how face recognition works is incorrect, please correct me.