Can Lightroom face detection be sped up on a large photo library?

Question

I’m using Lightroom on Windows to tag a very large library (about 80,000 photos) with face detection. The catalog, previews/cache, and images are all on an NVMe SSD. While it runs, Task Manager shows Lightroom processing briefly and then sitting mostly idle for several seconds, so overall progress feels very slow. Disabling GPU acceleration did not help.

Is this normal behavior for Lightroom’s face detection, and are there any practical ways to speed it up when working through a very large catalog?

user1943 · Accepted Answer

Here's my photography-centric answer. How often do you need to do this? Pretty much just once for the full collection. Maybe the equivalent once every few years. At 10 seconds an image, this is going to be done in under ten days.

So, just let it go and worry about something else for ten days.

I know this goes against the generally-admirable instinct to do things efficiently, but sometimes, letting it go is the right move. It's a case of this xkcd:

... where "how often" is "once".

Now, of course, from Adobe's point of view, this is something that their software does quite a lot, when you consider all of their userbase and use-cases. So, the equation is different for them — and I wouldn't be surprised to see this get better in a future release.

In the meantime, though, just let it crank and find something else to do with your time.

Can Lightroom face detection be sped up on a large photo library?

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