The other day, I posted an article with an image of a large “family” (could also include friends) photograph that I’d love to be able to identify at least some of the people in. Google’s face recognition technology has not helped – in fact, I have not found any help with this technology in regard to older photographs. Some have claimed some success using Google’s face recognition technology in identifying faces in old photographs, but I have had ZERO success.
Even with photos that I know are of the same person (but left them to see if Google could identify based on other photos I had marked the name on the faces), Google thus far has not discovered or suggested the likeness in the other photos.
This photo, (which I posted the other day, but am posting again here), Google has recognized that there are 28 faces. There are in fact, 30 faces but Google’s face intelligence missed two infants.
Perhaps instead of looking at one large photo with everyone in it, it might be easier to find a way to “extract” each individual face – and we can do that with some screen shots of the faces Google tells us are in the photo. I had to make two screen shots as the column scrolled down further:
What I will do later is post individual photos of people we know, of people we think we might know, and then try to compare to these faces, extracted from the image.
Maybe it’s a waste of time and won’t be helpful, but have to start somewhere and even those things that seem a waste of time, still might generate some other ideas or possible ways to identify some of the faces.
This is a photo of someone who has been identified a Sarah McDowell:
Full photo:
Here’s her face extracted by Google’s “Face” recognition:
Personally, I think this could be a match for the person, 4th row, 1st on the right in the above extractions from the large photo.
On the other hand, we have this photo that we know to be of John Scott, Sarah McDowell-Scott, and their children, Hugh & Millicent:
Here’s a close up just Sarah’s face from this photo, followed by one of John Scott:
We also have this photo of John Scott:
And this one, taken in Dundee (he obviously changed his hair style and even the side he parted it on in later photos, apparently):
Personally, I see a resemblance in all of these John Scott photos to the google extracted face above, 2nd row, middle.
Of course, my mind could be just dreaming up a resemblance as well!
Let’s have a look at an old photo taken in Dundee, perhaps around 1885, but not after 1888 (it includes Alexander Greig, who passed away in 1888):
In this old photo, Google Photos intelligence doesn’t even recognize that there are faces in the picture. I get, “No people and pets available.” But we know there are faces 🙂 Let’s grab Great-Great-Grandfather John Scott:
Sadly, not a great photo – but compare anyway to the man in the face extraction above, 3rd row, left. I guess the similarity could simply be the beard and thin face. We probably don’t really have enough resolution or size to make a determination – but let’s try to start somewhere.
What do you think? Anything strike your eyes that I’m not seeing? Or ideas I haven’t had?
On another note, I do think we can, with certainty, identify this photo (which has nothing to do with the large family portrait above), as a photo of Alexander Greig. He is the older man in the family photo above, that we tried to extract the photo of GG-Grandfather John Scott:
Pretty cool to have a photo of one’s Great-Great-Great-Grandfather!