I've just released a new version of my Upload-to-Facebook plugin for Adobe Lightroom that can automatically tag people in photos you upload to Facebook.

It requires Lightroom CC/6, which was released last week, and also the latest version of my People Support plugin, which now allows you to associate a Facebook account with people in your Lightroom catalog.

(Update July 2015 — changes at Facebook made this feature not work for a while, but it's working again as of version 20150704.11 of the People Support plugin.)

Here's an example of how it works....

First, using Lightroom CC/6's facial recognition features, ensure that all faces that you want to tag are noted within the People view of the Library module.

If Lightroom does not automatically detect everything you want, you can manually add the faces with the “Draw Face Region” tool, available in Loupe (single-image mode) in Library, as illustrated here:

In the screenshot above, I'm in the process of drawing a rectangle around the back of the nearest cyclist's head, which of course wasn't automatically recognized as a “face” by Lightroom. Nevertheless, I want the cyclist to be recognized as a Person in my catalog, and to be tagged with his name at Facebook.

The “Draw Face Region” tool is available only in Library's Loupe mode (the keyboard shortcut to bring up Loupe mode is “E”). The tool is enabled via the bust-in-a-rectangle icon on the toolbar, highlighted with the orange circle near the bottom of the screenshot above.

If you don't see the toolbar in Lightroom, you can bring it up with the “T” keyboard shortcut. (“T” again toggles it away.)

If you see the toolbar but don't see the face-region tool icon, either your window is not wide enough to show the icon, or you've not enabled it for your toolbar. In either case, you can adjust things to your liking by using the little down-triangle icon at the far right, highlighted with a purple circle in the screenshot. There you can pick and choose what to show in the toolbar.

When you enable this tool, face regions that have already been recognized are shown, and you can drag out a new region with the mouse, as I'm doing in the screenshot above. There, I'm about ready to fill in the name of the foreground cyclist; earlier, I'd drawn and named the background cyclists.

Once I've done that for all the photos that I intend to upload to Facebook, I want to make sure that I've associated a Facebook account with each person that I intend to tag at Facebook. I do this via my People Support's “Manage Keyword People” dialog, which I invoke via:

(Actually, I use it enough that I've assigned a keyboard shortcut to it, in my case “Control-Option-Command P”.)

The dialog brings up the hundreds of People keywords that my catalog has accumulated so far, which is overwhelming. I immediately cut this down to just the people found in the currently-selected photos by entering “!” in the “Filter” box, as illustrated here:

The “!” is one of the special search terms that the dialog supports, omitting anyone not tagged in the currently-selected photos. (Before invoking the dialog, I'd selected all photos I intend to upload.)

I want to make sure that each name has a small Facebook icon next to it, meaning that I've associated Facebook accounts with all of them. In the example above, I've not yet associated Gorm with his Facebook account, so I click on his name to do that now:

(Note: as of People Support plugin version 20150517.387, the button label is “Link Person To Facebook Account”.)

I click on the highlighted button and paste in the URL for his Facebook profile page, and now I've got accounts associated with all the people in my next upload.

Finally, in the dialog for my Facebook export or publish, I make sure that I do not strip people information. The option to so do is in Lightroom's standard “Metadata” section of the Publish or Export Dialog:

I make sure that “Remove Person Info” is not enabled, and proceed with the upload to Facebook. The result is an album filled with photos with my friends already tagged.

I had a wonderful little bike ride today, 48km distance with 1,720m of elevation gain (30 miles of distance with 5,600 feet of elevation gain). (The report of the ride at Strava reports longer distance and less elevation gain, but I trust Google's elevation data for Kyoto more than I truest my phone's GPS/GLONASS unit's elevation.)

Things didn't start well.

I went downstairs to my bike to find the rear tire quite flat, likely a slow leak from the spoke problem I had on the ride last week. I'd ridden 70km after it was fixed so I thought it was fine, but apparently not.

I could have changed the tube myself, but I worried that the problem originated in the wheel and so a new tube would quickly go flat as well, so I pushed the bike to my cycle shop and had them check it out.

A short wait and $15 later I had a new tube and a diagnosis that my wheel was fine. At noon I set off for the mountains.

40 minutes and 14km later I arrived at Kurama Temple (鞍馬寺), and took a short break to buy a bottle of sports drink...

This is where we had paused last week for cyclist photo ops.

Anyway, I quickly took off for Hanase Pass (花背峠). I would be my third attempt, the first having been 2½ months ago on my first real ride, and the second a week ago.

I'd climbed 200m in the 14km it took to get here, but now would almost quadruple that in less than half the distance... from here it's 6.2km of unrelenting slope.

This time I had one single secondary goal: make it to the top without pausing. (My primary goal, as always, is make it to the top without giving up).

So, I let myself fall into the easiest gear right away, and I just stayed there for the 38 minutes it took to the top. This time was 9:04 faster than the first, with its slushy roads and heavy camera. It was 4:22 faster than last week, which lacked the snow but not the camera.

Oddly, my heart rate never got above 138 bpm. Mostly my body could handle the climb just fine... the bigger problem is that I'm really weak-willed when it comes to physical exertion for its own sake. That's why my primary goal is always “don't give up”.

Anyway, I was pleased to arrive at the top without having stopped for anything, and like I said, my body can handle the slow pace, so I just kept on going down the other side. This was my first time to go down without the road being a sheet of ice, and it was exceedingly pleasant.

Five minutes of lovely downhill sweeping curves later, I was at “Cowbell”, a restaurant in the middle of nowhere:

I ordered a cup of coffee and sat outside. I hadn't had anything to eat yet today, and I wasn't hungry, but I thought I should have some energy for the return climb. I didn't want either of the two food items they had on the menu (toast and curry rice), so I asked whether they'd make an onigiri (rice ball) for me, and they kindly did:

I didn't want cramps on the way back, so sat and read a book for 50 minutes, then headed back.

It was my first time to ride up the back side of the mountain, and it ended up giving me the best feeling of accomplishment. I was in a middle gear just flying up, waiting for the difficult/steep sections that would require dropping down to the easiest gear, at which point I'd settle into a “just get it done” pace.

And suddenly I was at the top. I was shocked.

I knew this section was nowhere near as tough as the first climb (it turns out that it's just 170m of elevation gain over the course of 2.7km), but the hard parts never came, and it took just 13:10 (flying downhill on the way in had taken five minutes). Felt great!

Then from the pass back down to Kyoto, standing on the pedals, flying down and around corners at an average speed of 36kph, waving “hi” to cyclists riding up. Felt great.

Tomorrow should be a much longer ride... (UPDATE: it was)

Lightroom CC/6 has been out for a few days, and in working with Lightroom's new Face Tagging feature, I've run across something that could be a privacy issue for some folks.

Keywords in Lightroom have an “Include on Export” option; if it's disabled, the keyword is not (supposed to be) included in exported copies of photos. This is useful for workflow-related keywords that you use merely to help manage your catalog, or for keywords you'd rather not expose to the public.

The problem I've discovered in Lightroom CC/6 is that the “Include on Export” option is ignored if it's a “Person” keyword (one used with the new Face Tagging feature).

For example, imagine tagging photos from an office party and giving your boss the snarky name “My Jerk of a Boss”. Of course, you'd not want to expose that in copies you uploaded or shared with others, so you'd think you were safe by disabling “Include on Export” like this:

Lightroom's Publish/Export dialog includes a standard section on what metadata to include in the exported copies:

The “Remove Person Info” option is new in Lightroom CC/6, and it seems that it (and it alone) controls whether “Person” keywords are included in export. If this remove option is not turned on, all Person keywords are exported even if their “Include on Export” option has been explicitly disabled.

In the “My Jerk of a Boss” example, you might have wanted other People keywords to be included, so not turned on the “Remove Person Info” option, thinking that the lack of “Include on Export” would keep “My Jerk of a Boss” out of the images you share. I assume that's how it's supposed to work, but it doesn't.

I don't suppose that this bug (if that's what it is) will actually affect very many people, but if it does, it could be a doozy.

I've reported it to Adobe. I'll update this post with new info as it becomes available.

In related news, I've figured out how to bring the Face-Tagging feature to my Facebook plugin. For example, after having used Lightroom's Face Tagging feature to identify faces of friends in the photos from the 100km bike ride I recently wrote about, all the tagging in the exported copies at Facebook was automatic via the beta version of my plugin. It was nice not to have to walk through every copy at Facebook and tag people.

So that's something to look forward to. It was while working on this that I discovered the potential privacy issue.

I finally made my first 100+km bike ride the other day, cycling with some folks from the Cycling Kyoto Facebook group.

Strava says the ride was 105km (65 miles). Even though it's 10% longer than the first long ride I did, this time was much easier because it had only 1,300m (4,200 ft) of vertical rise, only about a ⅓rd of the first ride's climbs. Even last month's 58km ride was much harder, again, due to having more elevation. Flat distance seems to be easy.

Anyway, as usual we met in front of the Sanjo St. Starbucks...

The route I'd planned brought us through some of the more mild mountains of northern Kyoto early on, and within 26km (a quarter of the planned distance) we were done with almost all the climbs. It was that point that Ross turned around to forge his own more-mountainous path. For the rest of us, the last 80 kilometers would be downhill or flat, except for one short but intense hill near the end.

At some point coming down the mountain toward Lake Biwa (the largest lake in Japan), a spoke on my rear wheel broke. (Putting it another way, my rear wheel misspoke 😉 .)

Luckily, likely the only bike shop for miles just happened to be right there, and was even open.

After an impromptu 40-minute break while my wheel was unbroke, we took off again north through the countryside...

I've got to figure out a better focus mode when shooting blind while I ride... I get too many shots like the one above where it's the background in focus.

Everyone was taking straight-on photos like the one above, but I thought it might look a bit better at an angle...

I took the opportunity to have someone snap a picture of me with my camera...

... and then I set up my camera with a timer...

... and then it was time to continue our ride.

We eventually made it to our turn-around destination, the Shirohige Shrine (白鬚神社), a name meaning “white beard”, implying wisdom.

This shrine gate has appeared on my blog in the past, perhaps most interestingly six years ago in “Overexposure and Underexposure, and the Compensation Thereof”.

Then it was time to head back....

I'd noticed the interesting reflections on the way up, so when we came flying by on the way home, I made sure to take a picture.

A bit later we came to a pretty area and stopped for more photos, such as the one leading this post, and this one:

Riding from the lake back over to Kyoto involves a short but intense little mountain, and then it was smooth sailing home...

It was nice and mostly relaxing. Something similar should be great in two weeks during the rice-planting season. For next week, though, I think I need something a bit more meaty, even if not as long...

I got to meet Matt Campagna of The Turning Gate Software yesterday for coffee, conversation, and a hike over the mountain paths of the Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社). He makes highly-regarded Web Gallery plugins for Lightroom, so we had plenty to talk about with the release of Lightroom 6 that had happened earlier that day.

I think this is my second wigglegrams I've published from this location, the first having been this one in December. Neither are quite as nice the previous wigglegram I published last weekend. 😉

I've tweaked the code for the wigglegram on this one so that it might be a bit smoother on mobile devices when tilting to wiggle, but considering how mobile-unfriendly my site is (something made apparent when talking about it with Matt, an expert in this area), slightly better tilting code is probably just lipstick on a pig. I'll have to find the time to learn all this mobile stuff...