Lightroom: Add possibility to tag (metadata) a specific region of a picture

For me it's the ability for "tagging" faces (or rather annotating a photo) and specific objects to add details. I want to take an event photo and "tag" the people, like people do in social media programs. This would give me better cataloging abilities and would make it easier for me to tag one photo with then pass that on as a reference to an assistant so they can tag the rest of the people in the event photos.

I agree that in the case of "dog" you gain nothing from region specific tags/annotations than you do with just a keyword to the whole photo. But if there was a group of dogs, with region specific tags/annotations you could identify the specific breeds for future reference / smart collections, etc.

I am also a fan of the editing notes concept for annotations, and cataloging of large product shots. I believe there are uses for scientific related annotations where region specific keywords and annotations could be helpful. I'm sure if this feature is added there will be uses people will come up with that none of use have thought of.
(this has been on my wish list since LR2, would be great to see this make it to production)

Hi,
First thank you for your interest in this feature: here are my thoughts:

First let's speak from a photograph point of view only:

-There is the obvious annotation usage
-Than comes the obvious classification usage - especially for faces
When you take the example of dog, you take the very situation where it does not bring much more than a simple keyword because every body can recognize a dog. But the feature is extremely useful in similar situation when you label a photo with multiple animals/objects that not every bodies know. For example I have many photos of the African bush where you can see up to 4 different breeds of antelopes. If I do not label them immediately after shooting, I have no idea which is which and I often end up on specialized forums asking for the name, same comes with insects,... And I think Walt gave a very good example with different dog breeds.
You may also label your dogs with their names (and in this case it is good if the region tag is of "pet" type)
finally there are other things to label in a photo, where even if you have only one object of that type photographed you might find it handy to know which is which: imagine a photo of a car engine where each visible piece is labelled. Personally I prefer labels to the keyword as the labels will clearly indicate which part of the photo correspond to which piece of the engine. With keywords only many people will quickly be lost.

-But I also think that implementing a region tagging feature goes along with implementing an intelligent zoom: When you review your photos in the development or library module, you usually either view the full photo or a zoomed area. With tagged region we could be able to review the tagged area only. this would mean that when I press "next" while viewing an area I may jump to the next tagged area of the same photo (ie : I may not be moving to the next photo as long as I have not gone through all of the areas)
This would allow me to scrutinize all the -dogs- of a photo more efficiently than today. This would be even more useful with automatic face/pet detection and would allow in this case to quickly eliminate all the photos where the faces/pets are not sharp enough for example.

From scientific, web designers,... point of view

-this allows to clearly identify an object,.. and share this easily. This allow new usage: for example you could label many part of you photos and then use these photos as a new kind of recaptcha : asking the user to select the region where you can see a dog :)

Regards

here is an example of the use of region labels: it is a simple photo with only 2 things on the photo : grass and one grasshopper.
Here the simple keyword grasshopper, will not be enough because the grasshopper is mimetic and is almost invisible in the photo. So if I saw that keyword many years after taking the photo I may think I made a mistake and that the photo is just a worthless photo of grass that should go to the rubbish.

note that the original photo is much larger. the link provided here displays a cropped version of the photo to make it easy to spot the grasshopper.

The photo is here: http://insecterra.forumactif.com/t212...

Julie--

I see the ability to tag specific regions as essential for marking up (and later finding) not only individual elements that are intentional in a photograph, but also errors or items of note that are too small to immediately notice. This is especially important for educational purposes (either formal, self-improvement, or collaborative)--I'd want to mark, for example, "error--reflection" or "remove--background object" or "example--chromatic aberration" with a label and region in an otherwise technically excellent image. (Another common use: Sometimes I'll reject an image, find it later, and vaguely recall that something was wrong with it but I can't remember exactly where or what it was.)

Ideally, the ability to search for labels would allow the user to have the regions displayed as a mask (with a specified level of transparency) and with the labels attached to each region as a callout (with a specified font and size). The images could then be displayed as a slideshow, exported, or just examined onscreen.

Hope this helps!

--Julian

So there are 2 issues here:
1) image region metadata- implement this immediately. Adobe decided on a standard in Nov 2010. It's useful for tagging people (Grampa, Grampa's brother Chuck), items (Grampa's childhood tricycle) and location information that isn't obvious from GPS data (the house Grampa grew up in). It's helpful for identifying people in large group photos (a picture of Grampa's high school senior class) or athletes in sports photos or species in wildlife photos, etc.

We as a society are taking, editing, sharing, archiving, whatever-ing photos at an astonishing rate. If we want all these pictures to be anything other than digital garbage to peers and future generations, we need to identify what we're taking pictures of in ways that our audience (family, friends, clients, students, historians, colleagues, etc) can use.

If I were Adobe, I wouldn't let an employee write code for any other feature until image region metadata was implemented. The standards and framework have been in place for years. Just do it.

2) facial recognition- the holy grail of image region metadata is, I'm sure, for it to intelligently tag itself with relevant information. I'm sure someone is saying "Users shouldn't have to manually identify Grampa, the software should just identify Grampa automatically." That's a great idea but it's an added bonus that makes image region metadata quicker and easier to apply. I'm sure Adobe is working on this and I'm sure they want it to be excellent but in the mean time PLEASE give me the ability to tag faces manually while you work on how to do it automatically.