FRAME 02 - TAG · LIGHTROOM CLASSIC PLUGIN
Find every face in your catalog, automatically.
A Lightroom Classic plugin that finds the people in your photos and tags them as keywords. Train in 5 minutes. Scan runs in the background. Search by name forever - 90-95% accurate on the people you have trained, after a few review rounds.
$39 UNTIL OCT 31 - $69 FROM NOV 1 · LIGHTROOM CLASSIC 6+ · MACOS 14+ ON APPLE SILICON (M1+) · INTEL / WINDOWS - REQUEST IT →
ONE NIGHT, EIGHT GUESTS - WATCH THE SCANLIVE DEMO - THE REAL MATCHER, TRY IT
THE REST OF THE NIGHT - MAYA LIGHTS UP WHEREVER SHE APPEARS
SEE IT IN ACTION
Train, scan, and search
by name.
CLICK TO PLAY - WITH SOUND, CAPTIONS ON SCREEN
The video is an animated walkthrough of the workflow, not a screen recording. Inside Lightroom, Face Tagger works through Lightroom's own tools: each person becomes a keyword under "People" and gets a collection of their photos. There is no separate people panel and no face boxes drawn on the photo - Lightroom does not let a plugin add those. Prefer the real screen? Watch the full 10-minute walkthrough.
Read the transcript
The video is narrated, and the narration is also captioned on screen. This is the full spoken text:
- Every photo of Emma is in here. Somewhere.
- People view slows down on a big catalog. So you scroll forever.
- Face Tagger finds your people - in two different ways.
- Know exactly who you want? Train that person with just two to five photos and a name.
- Now every face is boxed and named - one photo, or a whole group at once.
- Type a name, and every photo of them is right there. One click.
- It all runs on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded, and it even works offline.
- It tags people shot from behind, reads RAW, and makes everyone a Lightroom keyword.
- Train in five minutes, then search your whole catalog by name.
- A different job - for people you never trained. Scan, and it suggests groups of matching faces to name.
FEATURES - WHAT DEVELOPS
Built for photographers
who shoot real life.
Every photo of Mom, one click away.
Recognized people become Lightroom keywords. Type a name in the keyword filter and every shot of them - across years of catalog - shows up instantly.
Trained on two photos. Finds the rest.
Pick one or two reference shots per person. The plugin combs your whole catalog and tags every other photo of them - automatically.
Catches people even when faces aren't visible.
Body matching plus surrounding-photo context tag people shot from behind, in profile, or partially turned away.
Your faces stay on your Mac.
Face detection runs entirely on your machine - your faces stay on your Mac, with no servers and no accounts in the loop. Works with your internet off.
What you shot is what it reads.
Reads .ARW, .CR2, .NEF, .RAF, .DNG and other camera RAW files directly, and iPhone HEIC photos too. No need to export to JPEG first.
One-time price. Move it between Macs.
$39 once - $69 from November 1. No subscriptions, no usage limits. Deactivate on one Mac to free a license slot, then activate on the new one.
UNDER THE SAFELIGHT - WHY IT'S DIFFERENT
People view stops at the face. This goes further.
Lightroom Classic's People view finds faces and groups them, and on a small catalog that is enough. On a big one it drifts: it slows down, asks you to confirm the same person again and again, misses anyone turned away from the camera, and keeps its groupings locked inside People view. So Classic photographers either finish the job by hand (years of catalog, one keyword at a time) or stage their catalog in Apple Photos just to use Faces, then never get those tags back into Lightroom where they actually edit.
Face Tagger gives Classic the missing piece. Train on a few reference photos, run a scan, and every person becomes a real Lightroom keyword - usable in Smart Collections, search, filters, exports, and any other tool that already reads your keywords. No round-trip. No second app.
HOW IT WORKS - THREE STEPS TO A TAGGED CATALOG
Teach it who's who,
then let it do the work.
Train
Select one or two photos of each person you want recognized. Name them. That's your whole training set.
Scan
Pick a collection, run Deep Scan. The plugin processes every photo locally and matches faces against your trained people.
Review
Confirm suggestions for unrecognized faces. Sync corrections auto-tunes matching so the next scan is sharper.
CONTACT PRINTS - WHAT PEOPLE SAY
The face-recognition tool
that writes real keywords.
I'm very impressed with Face Tagger - it is a thousand times more efficient than Lightroom's built-in facial recognition. It tagged literally decades of family photos I would never have gotten through by hand. And, when I hit a snag, the personalized help I got was a lifesaver.
...the fact that it all runs locally matters more to me than I expected. Long overdue, very welcome.
Trained it on three photos of my son and it pulls him out of two years of catalog automatically. I'd been telling myself I'd tag those by hand for years. One Saturday afternoon and now every shot of him is a click away.
Lightroom Smart Collections were always missing the most obvious filter - the people in the photo. Once Face Tagger turned my catalog into people-keywords, I rebuilt half my workflow around them. "Every shot of my niece in 2025" is now one click instead of a weekend.
FAQ - BEFORE YOU INSTALL
Frequently asked
questions.
How is this different from Lightroom Classic's built-in People View?
Lightroom Classic's People View detects faces and groups them, and it's free - try it first. In practice it slows down on large catalogs, needs a lot of manual confirmation, and its groupings stay locked inside People View. Face Tagger works differently: you train it on a few reference photos of a person, and it tags every other shot of them - even when the face isn't clearly visible - as real Lightroom keywords, so the names work in Smart Collections, search, filters, and exports. Weighing it against Excire or Peakto? We put the face recognition plugins for Lightroom Classic side by side.
Does it really run fully offline?
Yes - after a one-time model download at first run (~500 MB, 2-5 minutes). After that, no part of the plugin needs the internet. Your photos and face data never leave your machine.
Which Macs and operating systems are supported?
For v1, the shipping installer runs on macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer with Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3, M4) only. Intel Macs are not supported yet - the installer is arm64-only for now.
Windows and Intel Mac support is on the roadmap if there's enough demand. Tell us if you need Intel Mac or Windows - demand drives priority. Until then, our roundup of the best Lightroom Classic plugins notes which ones already run on Windows.
How much disk space does it use?
Roughly 500 MB for the AI models. Face data for your catalog is tiny - about 2 KB per photo, stored in a small database file next to the plugin folder.
Does it support RAW and iPhone HEIC files?
Yes. The plugin reads .ARW (Sony), .CR2/.CR3 (Canon), .NEF (Nikon), .RAF (Fuji), .DNG, and other common RAW formats directly, plus iPhone HEIC photos. No need to export to JPEG first.
How many machines can I activate on?
Your license key activates on a limited number of computers at a time. If you switch machines, use Library > Plug-in Extras > Deactivate License on the old one to free a slot, then activate on the new one.
Does it work with multiple Lightroom catalogs?
Yes. The people you train are shared by all your catalogs, so you train someone once and they are recognised everywhere. If two catalogs contain the same photo files, open the second one, select those photos and run Library > Plug-in Extras > Manage People & Data > Re-apply Keywords from Scan History to bring the tags across without scanning again.
Where is my face data stored?
Locally, in face_data.db next to the plugin folder on your Mac. Delete that file (or uninstall the plugin) to remove everything. See our Privacy Policy for the biometric-data details.
How accurate is it?
It depends heavily on your photos. Clear, well-lit faces match reliably after you've trained a person on just one or two reference photos. Side-profile, low-light, partially occluded, and body-only matches (people shot from behind) are inherently less confident and often end up in the review queue rather than auto-tagged.
The plugin is designed around the idea that you'll correct it as you go. After each scan, you confirm or reject suggestions in the review step. Sync Corrections then auto-tunes per-person tolerance based on that feedback. After a few scan + review + sync cycles on the same catalog, accuracy typically climbs into the 90-95% range for the people you've trained - and keeps getting sharper with every round.
Which should I use: Deep Scan, Scan Selected for Faces, or Suggest People?
Deep Scan Selected Photos is the one for a new batch: it groups the faces it does not know yet for you to name, tags the people it already knows, then shows you whatever is left.
Scan Selected for Faces tags the people it already knows, then shows you the faces it could not match. Suggest People from Clusters groups the faces it does not know yet for you to name, and tags anyone it already knows along the way. Deep Scan runs both in one go. After you fix any wrong tags, run Sync Corrections and Auto-Tune on the same photos so it learns from your changes.
Can people go into my own keyword tree, like People > Family > Anna?
Yes. Type the person's name as the full path, with > between the levels - for example People > Family > Smith > Anna - in Train Selected as Person, in the naming dialogs, or in Manage People & Data > Rename a Person. Any level that does not exist yet is created, and every scan tags that exact keyword. Everything lives under the top-level People keyword, so Family > Anna also lands in People > Family > Anna, and a plain name like Anna goes straight under People.
Renaming a person changes future tags; rename the existing keyword in Lightroom's Keyword List to move photos you already tagged.
I already tagged people in Lightroom. What happens to those keywords?
They stay exactly as they are - Face Tagger never removes or renames a keyword. It does not learn faces from them either: a keyword says who is in a photo, not which face is theirs, so the plugin learns a person from Train Selected as Person.
Where the old keyword sits decides the rest. A name already under the top-level People keyword with the same spelling (People > Anna) is the one Face Tagger uses, so old and new tags end up together. A name anywhere else gets a new People > Anna next to it, so drag the old keyword onto People in the Keyword List before you scan that person.
Tip: click the arrow next to a name in the Keyword List to see its photos, pick 3-10 with a clear face, and train from those with the same name.
Does Clear All Scan History reset Face Tagger?
No. It only forgets which photos have been scanned, so they can be scanned again. The people you trained and the keywords on your photos stay. To re-read just some photos, tick Re-scan photos already scanned in Scan Selected for Faces instead.
To start completely from scratch: quit Lightroom, rename face_data.db (next to the plugin folder), and restart your Mac. Face Tagger then starts with an empty database, and your keywords are not touched.
Will it touch my photos or my edits?
No. Nothing about your photos changes - not your edits, not your ratings, not your originals, not your catalog files. The plugin only reads pixels to find faces and writes back to your catalog as standard Lightroom keywords. You can remove every keyword Face Tagger added at any time.
Can I get a refund?
Yes - 30-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked. If it is not right for you for any reason, email us within 30 days of purchase and we will refund you in full. We would rather you be happy than keep a sale. Full terms on the Terms of Service page.
Are updates free?
Updates to the version you buy are free - including compatibility fixes for new Lightroom Classic releases - for at least 12 months from purchase, and in practice until the next major version. Your license never expires. A new major version is a separate purchase, discounted for existing owners and free if you bought in the 90 days before it ships. Full policy on the Terms of Service page.
What if I have questions or problems?
The plugin has a built-in Report a Problem menu item that captures the recent server log and opens our feedback form. You can also reach out directly via the contact form. Solo developer, personal responses.
THE PRINT - READY WHEN YOU ARE
Stop scrolling looking for
“the one with Mom”.
Train in 5 minutes. Tag your whole catalog. Search by name forever.
- One-time $39 until October 31 ($69 from November 1), unlimited scans - the closest tools that do this cost $229 and $270
- 30-day money-back guarantee - no questions asked
- Your photos never leave your computer
MACOS 14 OR NEWER ON APPLE SILICON (M1 OR LATER)