Faces In My FOREVER Account

A few weeks back, FOREVER launched its newest feature, facial recognition, which was a huge hit. Over 3,000 people purchased it on the very first day. Because I’m a FOREVER Ambassador, the business’s Facebook pages buzzed with people talking about their experiences. I knew I would get facial recognition, but I thought I’d wait a week to see what people thought. After reading about so many happy experiences, I couldn’t wait, so I purchased it.

You might know about facial recognition, but let me explain if you don’t. Once you’ve made your purchase, the system scans all the photos stored in your account. When I bought facial recognition, I had over 69,000 items in my account. Depending on your collection, that might seem like a lot or not very many. My collection consists of all my photos, video, audio recordings, and documents (I have all my genealogy stored in FOREVER).

I created a video showing my experience, which you can watch HERE. The system scans your photos, looking for pictures with faces. The only way you know it’s working is when you look at your people (on the left side of the screen). In my case, gathering all the photos with faces took 4-7 hours. I don’t know precisely because I checked it at four and seven hours points. You’ll see a count of all the items it’s found, but you’re okay with continuing to work on your account throughout the process. Once the count is done, it starts working through those photos, sorting the people. That part took the longest. I believe it took about four days. When you look at a picture with people, you can tell it was working on them because it will show that it’s processing, and you can see that in the video.

Once it is complete, you will see a screen filled with circles with the word “unnamed. ” All you need to do is enter the person’s name below the picture. Notice that many photos are included in that circle—all photos of that person. There will be more than one circle for some people; in that case, you just have to merge the two groups. This is a good thing because it ensures they are the same person.

If you named one of the people and then decided you’d like a different image as their cover photo, you can go into all the images and make that change. There are three dots on the upper right-hand side where you can “edit cover image.”

You’re all set once you’ve identified all the people and merged the ones you need. I’m thrilled because I’ve been working on tagging all my photos with people’s names. I still had quite a bit more to do, but in four days, everyone was essentially tagged through facial recognition in my account once I’d updated the names of the people. So now I feel so organized.

There were a few times that I found really impressive.

One of the things I do is sell vintage things on eBay. I had taken a photo of an album cover with Bing Crosby on it, and it was in my account. The system matched it up with a photo that I had of my aunt and uncle when they met Bing at the Jasper Park Lodge. I also found a picture of my Grandpa Thompson that I’d forgotten, and it was so cool to see it again. Another example is when it even did facial recognition on a photo hanging on the wall in one of my photos.

As I mentioned earlier, there is a cost. I chose to purchase for one year, but you can make a one-time payment or purchase in five installments, and then it’s yours forever. That’s what I’ll probably do next year.

The time it takes for your photos will depend on the number of photos you have with people.

One final thing I want to share is that each of your “people” has a profile, and if you expand it, it looks like the image below. Hmm, it looks a little like a tree profile, doesn’t it? Could a FOREVER family tree be in the future? I guess we’ll wait and see.

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