Face models
A face model is an optional extra that lets People group faces by the face itself instead of by look; People works on every Mac without one. This page covers how to tell which grouping your Mac is using, what Vixlo 0.1 can and cannot do about getting a face model, and what removing one does. What a model arriving or going does to your people has its own page. Read this one when you wonder which grouping you have.
Which grouping you have
There are three, tried in this order: a face model called AdaFace, then a face model called FaceNet, then by look, which needs no model. With both models on the Mac, AdaFace is the one used. The sheet sometimes calls a face model a recogniser; it is the same thing.
The People section names the grouping in one sentence only — Nobody yet. Faces are found on this Mac as a library opens, and grouped by look., or …and grouped by face. with a model — and shows it only while nothing has been read, which in practice means a library with no photographs. Once the section reads Finding faces, shows circles or reads Nobody seen twice yet., it says nothing about the grouping. The place to look is the Models sheet: a Faces row for AdaFace or FaceNet is the model People uses, if it loads.
The Models sheet
Choose Vixlo ▸ Models… from the menu bar. It sits beside Settings and has no key. It opens from the launch screen too, because what is installed is a fact about the Mac, not about a library.
The sheet is headed Models on this Mac and shows the number of models and the space they take on disk. Each model has a row: its name, a line giving what it is for (Faces, Words or Cleaning), its size and its licence, then the terms recorded for it. A face model's row says Faces; the two you can meet are AdaFace IR-101 (WebFace12M) and FaceNet InceptionResnetV1 (VGGFace2). Done closes the sheet.
On a Mac as installed there are no rows. The sheet says: No models installed. Search matches filenames, People groups by how a frame looks, and Spot clean uses the built-in fill — every one of them works, less well. The Tools/fetch-… scripts install the rest.
Adding a face model
The Models sheet lists models and removes them. It has no button to download or install one, and nothing else in the app does. Its own words, The Tools/fetch-… scripts install the rest., point to scripts in the Tools folder of Vixlo's source code, which are not part of the app you installed. On a Mac with only the app, People groups by look.
The scripts are what the sheet means by a script you ran: one for each face model, developer tools that this guide does not walk through. Each shows the model's source, licence and training-data terms and will not run until they are accepted. It then puts the converted model in ~/Library/Application Support/Vixlo/Models, the Models folder, with a small file recording the terms, which the sheet reads back.
People looks in the Models folder for a folder called AdaFace.mlmodelc first, then one called FaceNet.mlmodelc. A face model under one of those names is used, however it got there. One that will not load is passed over without a message, and People groups as if it were not there. A face model under any other name is listed in the sheet and never used.
Whichever model is installed runs on this Mac, and no photograph is sent anywhere. The weights of both face models come with research-use terms; Known limits says what that means.
A model is used the next time a library opens, and that first open reads every frame again. When a face model arrives or goes says what you see while it reads and what to check afterwards.
Removing a model
Press Remove beside a model's row. A confirmation names the model, lists what it would delete by file name with the folder and the total size, and says what is left alone: nothing else touched: no photograph, no decision, no library. For a face model a second row, What stops working, reads People grouping falls back to the next recogniser installed, or to grouping by how a frame looks. Names you have given are kept; the circles are recomputed.
Keep it goes back to the list and deletes nothing. Remove deletes the files, which do not go to the Trash, and there is no undo. The change shows the next time a library opens, when each library is read again by the next model on the Mac or by look, with the empty circles and the check afterwards that When a face model arrives or goes describes.
The confirmation's text ends Run the model's fetch script again to bring it back. The app cannot do that for you, so removing a model is a one-way step for anyone who only has the app. Press Remove only when you mean to be without it.
The other models
The sheet knows two more kinds of model, and Vixlo 0.1 cannot add those either. A Words model lets ⌘K search by what is in a photograph. Without one the field in the ⌘K panel reads Search filenames — install the words model for plain-words search, and a saved search made of bare words shows Words need the model under it. Neither sentence is something the app can act on. The third kind, Cleaning, is the same. Search covers the field.