Should I tag faces in Photoshop Elements 9 if they aren't clear?

Question

I just bought Photoshop Elements 9, and have never used it before. One of its highly touted features is face recognition/identification. According to ads, if you tell the program that a particular face is, say, Michael, it will automatically label similar photos as Michael in the future to the best of its ability.

Although I'm not a big facebook user, this reminds me of facebook's tagging feature. That feature doesn't remember faces in particular; it just lets users select an area of a photo that is linked to some friend's or user's profile.

My question is: should I — or, at least, is it okay to — tag all photos of people with Photoshop Elements's face tagging feature, regardless of whether their faces are hidden or blurry? On the one hand, it would be nice for me to be able to access shots of people more quickly through the photo tags, but on the other hand, I don't want to confuse the face recognition algorithm by entering too many "faces" that are actually jackets or backs of heads.

Answer 1

This one is really up to you. If you think that blurry faces will be of help to you at a future date, go for it. If you're not so sure, well, it's okay to skip them as well. Do what you think will be best.

Answer 2

Instead of using the facial recognition to tag the blurry photos, turn off facial recognition for those photos then just drag the appropriate name from the tag list onto the picture. That way your picture will still come up when you search on tags but the system won't link it to a face so it won't confuse or overload the facial recognition software.

That said, I've included lots of blurry faces and it still works fine.