I am lucky to have a large collection of historical family photos. Scanned by my relatives in Finland, I have photos dating back a century showing my great-grandparents with my grandparents as children. Identifying who’s who in these photos is a fascinating trip back in time. I’ve been exploring using People tags in Mylio Photos to catalog and organize my collection.
The People tags in Mylio Photos uses AI to match faces. The more people you tag, the more accurate it gets. My collection of historical photos has mostly come from my second cousins. My grandparents Leila and Pentti immigrated from Finland to Australia in the 1960s. Pentti’s older brother, Kauko, remained, and his descendants have kept in contact with my family.
Fortunately, many of the photos they have given us are labeled, showing who’s who. Mostly the labels are in Finnish (but I don’t speak or read Finnish). However, using People tags in Mylio Photos and starting with the few photos I can identify, I can build up reliable AI tagging to help me.
Tagging People with Mylio Photos
Starting with an untagged batch of photos, the first step is to start facial recognition by clicking the icon at the top of the right-hand panel. This brings up a panel of Faces detected in [Folder] and prompts you to approve suggested tags.
I started by tagging photos I recognized, like my Nanny and Poppy when they were young. You can double-click on a photo to examine it. Once everyone is tagged, it auto-advances to the next photo. This was useful for me with the labels being written on each photo, giving me the clues I needed to get some Known People into the Mylio Photos database.
The more tags you add, the more reliably Mylio Photos is able to find other photos with that person.
The top person (accessed with keyboard shortcut 1) is the program’s best guess. You can either choose from the list (type a few letters to search, once you have many people in the database), or type a name to create a new person. If the person isn’t on the People list already a prompt allows you to confirm their first name and surname.
Batch tagging People using Mylio’s suggestions
Batch tagging is the most useful feature of the facial recognition system in Mylio Photos. Start batch tagging by finding the People tab in the top bar: People > Untagged > Batch tagging (icon looks like two people).
Clicking on one of the stacks in this window brings up all the faces Mylio believes are the same person. You can hit the ? button underneath a face to tag anyone in the batch who isn’t the selected person. Then click Approve to add the tag to all remaining images.
Using the People tab to edit tagged names
You can edit Known People from the People tab. For example, I didn’t initially know my great-grandmother’s maiden name. I tagged her as Saima and later added her maiden name by editing her entry in People.
Once photos have all been tagged you can then view all the photos with that person. It’s also possible to organize further: Save all to a new Mylio album, move to a folder on your hand drive, download all original files, and so on.
Key steps in organizing historical photos with People tags
As with much historical research, sorting my family photos with Mylio Photos has been an iterative process. Starting with snippets of what I know, I’ve been over the photos again until I can fill in the missing information. Because Mylio lets you work with your photos from anywhere, I have been able to work on this in bits and pieces from my laptop, at my desk, and so on. There’s still more to do, but finding unknown photos of my relatives has been a lot of fun.
Want to learn more? Check out this complete walk-through video from Rich Harrington.
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