Some time ago Adobe introduced face recognition to Lightroom to allow you to tag family, friends, or whoever face was detected on your photos with their name. I wasn’t very interested on this feature at first, but recently I decided to give it a try.
Basically, you either click on the identity plate and let Lightroom start the face detection of all the images on your catalog, or once you are in a folder just press ‘O’ and trigger the face recognition for that folder only. Depending on the number of pictures you have the automatic process can take hours. Process is not perfect and reviewing and confirming people’s names will probably take you hours too.

Whether you like this face recognition thing or not, at the end of the day this will just add the name of every person you type in as a keyword inside every picture’s keyword hierarchy.
The problem Problem
I made a mistake while typing a name, so the first letter was lower case but realize only after having tagged it wrongly on a a bunch of images. When I noticed the error I thought it would be really simple to fix the spelling. However, Lightroom doesn’t seem to differentiate from lower case to capital letters so trying to correct it inside the People area in Lightroom didn’t work. Life is too short and I could have just let it be. However, the Sheldon Cooper inside me couldn’t.
The only solution I found was to look for the name you want to edit inside the Keyword List, which should be on the right panel of the Library. Then just right click on it and click on Edit Keyword Tag.


And that’s it! This is possible because Lightroom stores the names of the people you tag as keywords.
7 Comments
Add Yours →The Sheldon Cooper in me is very grateful for the Sheldon Cooper in you. :)
Thank you so much for this!! I had the same issue, I accidentally entered some names with lowercase first letter and couldn’t change it – they were forever bothering me. This solution worked wonders yay!! Thank you very much! :)
Thanks for your comment. I’m glad it helped!
Lovely. Lightroom immutable name capitalisation issue solved!
Thanks! <3
Thank goodness for the longevity of internet posts. This save me a lot of grief. Many Thanks.
This helped a lot! One note on LR Classic, not all the people with keywords show up. There is, however, a search box under Keyword List where you simply search for the name. i.e. erik then, when it finds it just below, use the right click to edit the Keyword Tag. All names with that lower case tag are now changed to the corrected upper case. Thanks again, David, for this post!