So I am just starting to upload all of my personal and family pictures to SmugMug. At first I figured it would be a fairly simple process aside from the huge draw on my internet connection. I soon realized that if I wanted to keep my massive picture collection organized and easy for others to view I would have so put a fairly significant amount of work into the project compared to what I originally thought.
I would like to share what I have found under the subject of tagging pictures with peoples faces who appear in them and being able to view that information in SmugMug.
Software versions:
Windows 8.1, Picasa 3 (3.9.138 Build 151 if anybody really cares), "The New SmugMug" (2014)
I used Picasa for all of the heavy lifting when it came to identifying the faces in pictures and pairing them with names. The process is not perfect but it is the simplest easiest way that I have found. I also just let Picasa keep all of the information for each picture in the ".picasa.ini" file they insert into every folder. This is what the tagging program I used reads in order to tag each individual picture.
There is a significant gap between Picasa and actually getting the keywords to show up after uploading to SmugMug. SmugMug says, "SmugMug will recognize any metadata in the standard EXIF/IPTC caption/keyword/title fields."
Here is my solution:
Download the latest version (1.7 at time of writing) of the simple executable progrm "AvPicFaceXmpTagger" here:
http://www.anvo-it.de/wiki/avpicfacexmptagger:main
Open the program, make sure you are on the "Tagging" tab, under "Tagging Options" make sure the only single box that is checked is in the "IPTC-Keyword Tags" section under "Step 2: Add tags" called "Picasa face name". This will write the face names you set in Picasa to the IPTC medadata for each picture. Next you will add the files to the list by either going through the "File" menu or dragging and dropping into the appropriate area. For the sake of keeping things simple and organized I only process one folder at a time. Now you can "START Tagging".
This is not quite the end though. I did have a significant bit of trouble in getting my face tags to show up in the SmugMug keywords even though they showed up perfectly fine in windows explorer in the details pane under "Tags:". At this point after you have tagged the pictures I have found that for some reason they aren't always completely saved to the actual IPTC metadata yet, or at least they are not recognized by SmugMug after uploading.
The final step before uploading is to select all of the individual pictures at once in the folder you are working with through windows explorer and in the "Tags:" field either add a tag and save or remove a tag and save or both, you just have to do something that requires saving. This will cause the name tags added from Picasa to be written in a way that SmugMug will recognize.
I know this seems pretty long and involved and I would bet some people may have better methods based on their workflow but it really isn't too bad after you go through a couple iterations. I would definitely suggest this method for adding keywords prior to uploading to SmugMug if you don't already have a defined workflow and want to start face tagging.
I would welcome any suggestions or shortcuts anybody might come across.