People¶
The People area groups your photos by the person in them, so you can find every picture of someone without remembering where any of them live. It is powered by on-device face recognition — and it is off until you turn it on.
Turning it on¶
Face recognition requires your explicit consent. Open the People area and you will find a plain explanation and an Enable button. Until you click it, nothing is scanned, no face data exists, and the rest of ArchiveMind behaves exactly as before.
Everything runs entirely on this computer. The recognition model ships inside the app, so nothing is downloaded, and no photo, face, or name ever leaves your machine — the same zero-network rule as the rest of ArchiveMind.
Scanning¶
After enabling, click Scan for faces. The scan works through your catalogued photos in the background and reports honest progress ("Scanning: 3 of 120 photos, 14 faces found"). You can keep using ArchiveMind while it runs.
- It is stoppable and resumable. Stop anytime; the next scan picks up where it left off rather than starting over.
- The first scan of a large photo library takes a while, and noticeably longer on Intel Macs. That is normal — let it run across sessions if needed.
- New photos are covered by running another scan after indexing them; already-scanned photos are skipped.
What it can and cannot see¶
ArchiveMind only groups faces it can recognise reliably. Faces that are small or distant in a photo are deliberately not recognised — matching them produces confident-looking nonsense, and ArchiveMind does not fake certainty. A group photo taken from far away may therefore yield no faces at all. This is honesty, not a malfunction.
Grouping is automatic and unnamed until you name someone. As you name groups, the names stay on your machine like everything else.
Turning it off, and deleting¶
Two separate controls, both in the People area:
- Turn off stops any future scanning. Existing face data is kept (turning it back on continues where you were).
- Delete all face data removes the entire face database — every face, group, and name — in one click. ArchiveMind asks you to confirm, because names you assigned are destroyed with it. Manual people tags made outside the People area are stored separately and survive.
Where the data lives¶
Face data is kept in its own database file beside your catalogue, on your own disk, readable by your user account only. See Who can read my catalogue? for the honest description of how local data is protected.