Why bother naming blurry faces?

You may notice blurry faces pop up in your gallery, or that faces have been named in the shadows of your pictures. This happens because the Ponga computer vision algorithms are good at detecting the details and patterns that distinguish one individual from another.

Here's an example from a wedding. The grandmother who appears in the shadows of this photo might have been difficult for members outside the family to recognize. Having her highlighted in this picture adds to the intergenerational story of the wedding.

How Naming Faces Works

When you first upload images, Ponga will examine every picture to detect faces. It collects faces that appear to be the same person and picks the clearest one to use as a reference portrait in the Gallery.

Once you put a name to a face, it appears in every picture in your account where their face was detected. The pictures are all added to an album labeled with that name. If that person appears in a picture with three other named people, such as in the example above, then the same picture will appear in four albums, one for each of the four people in the picture.

Blurriness in the Gallery

If the first picture detected for an individual is blurry, but it is the only picture of them in your collection, then the blurry version will be the reference portrait in the Gallery. As you add more pictures that include that same person, their name should be associated with the person you originally named, despite the blurry reference portrait.

If you see a blurry portrait in your gallery and you have no idea who it is, here are three good options:

• skip it for now and come back to it in the gallery later
• ignore it and forget about it
• give it a temporary name like "Whodis," then explore the picture in your library.

Note that when you create a unique name like Whodis, then an album will be created for that person and the picture (or pictures) including that face will be in the album. This gives you an easy way to explore the picture with added context to put a name to the face. If, after viewing the picture in context, you still have no idea who it is, then you can always just delete the selection and the album. Note that when you delete the album, be careful to specify deletion of the album and not the picture.  

Updating the Reference Portrait

The picture owner, once you've named someone, you can go to any picture in which they're included and tap on their name or face. That will take you to the Face Details page where you can update the reference portrait. Learn more about updating the reference portrait.