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BUG: Face clusters show fewer photos than face search for the same person #1164

@varsharaodevaraj

Description

@varsharaodevaraj

Is there an existing issue for this?

  • I have searched the existing issues

What happened?

What happened?

After AI tagging completes, Face Collections (People view) show very few photos for a person,
while face search returns many more photos for the same person.

Example from my local setup:

  • AI Tagging → Face Collections → Person 5eb9 shows 3 photos
  • Home → Face search using the same person returns 13 photos

This is confusing from a user perspective since both features appear to answer the same question:
"Show me all photos of this person."


How to reproduce

  1. Add a folder with many photos of the same person
  2. Enable AI tagging and wait for it to complete
  3. Go to AI Tagging → Face Collections
  4. Click a person cluster and note the photo count
  5. Use Home search with a photo of the same person
  6. Observe that search returns significantly more photos than the cluster view

Expected behaviour

Face Collections and face search should be consistent, or the UI should clearly explain
why results differ.


Actual behaviour

Face Collections show only a small subset of photos, while face search returns many more
for the same person.


Technical analysis (initial one)

From tracing the backend pipeline:

  • Face clustering uses DBSCAN with stricter similarity thresholds and may exclude faces as noise

  • Face search compares raw embeddings with a looser threshold and ignores clusters entirely

  • Some faces remain unclustered but still appear in search results

  • I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

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