A face was drawn by decoding the 1024px proxy it was found on and cutting the
box out again, every time the People screen opened. That made the screen a
derivative of the thumbnail cache: evict a proxy — which the cache may do at any
moment — and the cell goes blank, with no way back short of re-fetching the
original over the network and re-detecting it. It also cost a full JPEG decode
per image, per visit, to show a 96px cell.
So the crop is cut once, when the pixels are already in hand at detection time,
and kept. A 160px JPEG is a few KB against the ~250 KB proxy it replaces reading.
Where it lives is the interesting part. The catalog snapshot is uploaded *whole*
on every sync and downloaded by every device, so a crop column there would put
tens of MB on every round trip — the exact cost `face_shard`'s 25 MB cap exists
to bound, and the reason bulk per-face data lives in shards already. Crops
therefore travel in the face shards, beside the embeddings, and
`snapshot_for_upload` strips them from the copy it writes. Nothing reads a crop
out of a merged remote catalog — the merge touches collections and keywords only
— so a receiving device loses nothing. A shard carrying crops holds around 3,500
faces rather than 22,000, which is the price of a second device showing People
immediately instead of re-fetching every proxy.
The column is nullable and the reader falls back to the proxy, so a face indexed
before this still works and the next indexing pass fills it in.
V10 also adds `people.ignored`, for a person the user has looked at and does not
want to identify. Most clusters in a real library are strangers — passers-by,
other people's guests, a face on a poster — and there is no way to tell "not yet
looked at" from "looked at, don't care" without recording the second. It is a
column rather than a deletion because a deleted cluster comes straight back on
the next Regroup: the faces are still there and still similar, and nothing short
of remembering the judgement survives re-clustering. Same argument
`face_person_rejected` makes one level down.
And `prune_empty_unnamed`, for what clustering leaves behind. Regroup creates a
person per unanchored group and never removed the previous run's now-empty ones,
so pressing it twice added a rail entry per group it no longer believed in.
Named people are never touched however empty — a name is user data — nor is a
merge tombstone, which must outlive its faces to keep redirecting.
298 tests pass, including that the snapshot carries no crops while the live
catalog keeps them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
dtourolleandClaude Opus 5
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