How to swap faces in a group photo
A photo or video with several people in it works the same way as one with a single face — every face gets detected automatically — but a few practical details make group shots easier to get right once you know them.
Every face is found, not just the main one
Upload a group photo and Recast detects each distinct face in it, giving every one a number — Person 1, Person 2, Person 3, and so on — along with a thumbnail crop so you can tell at a glance who's who. You don't need to tell it how many people are in the shot or point out where they are; that part is automatic.
You only touch who you choose
This is the part people are often surprised by: you don't have to replace everyone. If six faces get detected and you upload a replacement for only one of them, the other five are left completely untouched — same pixels, same expressions, nothing changed. Swapping is opt-in per person, not all-or-nothing for the whole image.
Naming faces helps when there are a lot of them
"Person 1" through "Person 6" gets hard to track mentally in a busy photo. Rename any detected face to something you'll actually remember — a first name, a role, anything — before you start assigning replacements. It's a small step that saves real confusion on a photo with a dozen people in it.
What can go wrong, and what to do about it
• A face is too small or too blurry to detect. Faces far in the background of a wide shot, or badly out of focus, may not register at all. If someone you expected to see isn't in the detected list, that's almost always why — there's no replacement step, so there's nothing to do except use a higher-resolution source photo if one exists.
• Two people are overlapping or occluding each other. A hand in front of a face, or two people's faces very close together at a steep angle, can confuse detection. Try a shot where faces are more clearly separated if the group composition allows it.
• Someone is at a steep side angle. Detection and swapping both work best on faces that are at least partially forward-facing. A pure profile view is the hardest case.
For videos with a group in frame
The same logic applies across a whole video: each person is tracked continuously as the camera moves and as they move, so you choose replacements once per person, not once per frame. If someone walks out of frame and back in later, Recast does its best to recognize them as the same person rather than creating a duplicate — though a very long absence, a big wardrobe change, or a scene cut can occasionally make it treat a reappearance as a fresh detection, which just means you'd map that occurrence separately.
A quick checklist
• Upload the highest-resolution version of the group shot you have.
• Rename faces before assigning replacements if there are more than two or three people.
• Only upload replacements for the people you actually want changed — everyone else stays as-is automatically.
• Make sure you have consent for every face you're replacing, same as a single-person swap.
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