Registering a Face

Register a face to be alerted when that person appears. No separate photo session is needed: you pick a face from saved recordings and give it a name.

Before you begin, turn on face recognition and make sure the person has been recorded since then.

One photo at a time from a recording

On the History tab, click Timeline next to the title and move to a time when the person appears. For how to move around, see Viewing and Playing Recordings.
Pause with the play button or the Space key. Boxes appear on people and faces. Face boxes carry a Face tag.
Click the face box. The scene view opens at that moment with the face box selected. Find by face, the Select a face list, and Register appear beside the box.
Choose a name under Select a face. For a new person, choose + New face and type a name.
Click Register. The photo shows Registered as (name) and Manage registered faces. Clicking Manage registered faces opens Settings > Face recognition.
Register two or three more photos of the same person.

A face box selected in the scene view, with a name chosen for registration — The scene view opened by clicking a face box on the timeline. Find by face and a list for choosing the name to register appear beside the selected box.

When boxes appear, and how to pick one

For recent recordings (up to 72 hours), boxes are shown during playback too. On the timeline, one click on a box pauses and opens the scene view. In the scene view, a click during playback pauses first, and the next click picks a box.
For older recordings, boxes appear only while paused at the tick marks on the progress bar (the moments where Spot analyzed people). If No indexed people at this point is shown, click a tick mark or use Previous indexed point and Next indexed point.
Clicking a person who is not indexed yet shows This person is not indexed yet, so search and enrollment are unavailable. Try again after indexing finishes.

When the timeline is not shown (device software below 1.29.3, and others)

Below 1.29.3, or when a photo-only camera is included in the camera filter, the Scenes list is shown instead of the timeline. In that case, click Scenes next to the title on the History tab and open a recording showing the person. If it is a video, pause it, click the face box, and follow steps 4 to 6 above. Boxes appear only at the tick marks on the progress bar.

Several photos at once from search results

Open face search results. You can also open a card in History > People with Faces selected. On device software 1.29.3 or later, the card opens as a journey list with one tile per stay; the checkboxes and registration work the same way, and each stay registers its representative photo.
Select the photos to register with the checkbox at the top left of each tile, or by long-pressing on a phone. To register a single photo, click the tag icon (Register this face) on its tile.
Click the tag icon (Register selected faces) in the toolbar. The row Register the n selected photos as whom? appears.
Choose a name or add one with + New face, then click Register. When finished, Registered as (name) (n photos) is shown. If some fail, Couldn't register n photos. is shown.

Two photos checked in face search results, with the row asking whom to register them as — After you check photos and click the tag icon (Register selected faces) in the toolbar, a row for choosing the name appears above the results.

The face is registered when the name appears in the Registered faces list under Settings > Face recognition. The person can now be chosen for Specific face detected in an alert.

Note Registering a mix of front and side views, in bright and dim light, greatly improves recognition. With a single photo, the person is more easily confused with someone else.

Caution The cards under History > People are an automatically built list and are separate from face registration. To use a person in alerts, register their face as above.

Name rules and supported versions

Names cannot contain a comma (,) or colon (:). Picking faces by box requires device software 1.29.1 or later. Picking boxes from the timeline requires 1.29.3 or later.

Managing and deleting registered faces

The Registered faces list below the switch in Settings > Face recognition shows the registered people and the number of photos each has. The list stays visible while face recognition is off.

Click a name to expand that person's registered photos. The ✕ (Delete sample) at the top right of a photo deletes it immediately.
Delete on a person's row asks for confirmation. Deleting removes all of that person's registered photos, and alerts will no longer fire for them. Existing records and video are kept.
While every camera is off, registered photos cannot be loaded and Couldn't load the registered photos. Photos can't be shown while the camera is off. is shown.

Caution A registered name cannot be changed. To change a name, delete the person and register them again, then point the alerts that used the person to the new name in Edit alert.

To delete	Method
Registered faces	Delete them in the registered faces list in Settings > Face recognition.
Face data in recordings	Deleted automatically with the recording when the storage period passes.
Future data	Turning the feature off stops further data from being created.