Family Search Compare-a-Face

[Sinann]

Gave this a go, it was okay but I wanted to get rid of the first photo I uploaded, I couldn't see a way at first but when I closed the site than went back into it I clicked on the photo it though was me and the option to delete it came up.
The others were already gone as I had click no earlier.

[Ayashi]

I was also told when I was a teenager, I looked like Farah Fawcett but it was my hairstyle (in my own opinion), 1970s?

You reminded me of an incident when I was a young teenager. We were invited to the birthday party of a friend of my mother's and I was hanging around when a younger boy approached me and said, slightly obnoxiously, "Excuse me, are you Zoe from Eastenders?" I snapped "Do I LOOK like Zoe from Eastenders?" He shrugged and said "No, but your hair does". 

[staffs_vic]

I hope nobody will mind if I breathe some new life into this thread after all this time.

I wonder whether anyone else has been experimenting with the Compare-a-Face service (possibly an upgrade from its status in 2018 when the last post on this thread was made) and what sort of percentage matches you are finding for self, parent-child, grandparent-child and sibling relationships.

My experiments so far seem to show that it can usually match a picture of the same person with 90-100%, perhaps a little less if one of the photos is fuzzy or the face is very small.

Parent-child seems to be in the 60s and 70s and grandparent-child can be somewhere between 30s and 60s, quite variable.

I've also seen that it can sometimes find matches of around 30 or 40-odd between people who are unrelated, as far as I'm aware.

One of the main reasons I'm interested in this is that some months back, I bought a photo from eBay that was taken by a photographer who lived a few doors away from my great-great-grandfather Edward Yardley's home. I was struck by the resemblance between the young man and my grandfather, (also Edward) but I wondered whether it was wishful thinking - I don't have a photo of Edward Sr, who died aged only 31.

I ran the unknown photo through the Compare-a-Face service and found similarities of 67% and 75% similarity to a photo of my great-grandfather William, Edward Sr's son.

I'm wondering now how likely it may be that these similarities may have been thrown up by chance, and how much (if anything!), I can read into this.

(The attached photos show the unknown photo on the left.)

[dragonfly13]

I had JUST posted with two of my family photos here, asking RootsChatters if they resemble each other!  I tried doing it at Family Search.  Before I mastered the art of pulling out the correct individual from a group photo, it compared the young man to the Husband of the woman I wanted to have it compared to!  FS said 34% resemblance to the woman who might possibly be his mother.  Which is nice….except FS found a 38% resemblance to the man who is not related to the young man at all.  This experience has shaken my faith in Family Search photo comparison software, if I had any faith to begin with….

[staffs_vic]

Oh dear... but I think the FamilySearch comparison must, because of its nature, rely on aspects of resemblance that can be reduced to mathematics - ratios of distances between facial features, or perhaps equivalent things that can be drawn out of the data using AI. It can't really capture the less concrete aspects of resemblance - mannerisms, for example, and even things like eye/hair colour since most of the photos it's working with are black and white. So perhaps the resemblances that a human observer might pick up on and the ones that the algorithm picks up on are quite different from one another.

I've also come across resemblances in the 30% and 40% range between people who are, as far as I'm aware, unrelated, as well as between people who have a grandparent/grandchild relationship. I suppose a lot does depend on which features you inherit from which ancestors too.