SmartFace Platform can store all data which it recognizes in the incoming live streams or video files. This data may be, for example, whether a face was detected, identified, when it disappeared from a video, on which camera occurred an event and when, etc. All this data can be stored together with cropped images of a person and the full frame from the input.

In various situations, it is required that SmartFace doesn't store this data. For example, because of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in European Union, lack of people's consent for processing of their personal data or simply because of huge requirements on the data storage.

SmartFace Platform allows you to enable or disable the collecting and storing of this data. By disabling data storage, data processed from live streams and video files won't be stored. Disabling data storage however, doesn't affect data stored in watchlists.

Data storage options

You can enable or disable video data storage by configuring one of the following options in the property VideoDataStorageConfig:

Disabling data storage

If you configure the option None, SmartFace Platform stops storing the processed data into the database and stops sending database notifications. Only direct notifications about match results sent from SmartFace Platform will be available to you. For more information, see the chapter Notifications explained.

Please note that face images and templates for watchlist members are still stored in the database.

Enabling data storage

If you configure the option All, SmartFace Platform stores the events for detected people (regardless if they are registered in a watchlist or not). Data together with the face images and full frames are saved into the database and database notifications are triggered as well.

The option All is the default value.

The save strategy All can produce huge amount of data and can cause that you will run out of storage space.

Define the face-saving strategy

When VideoDataStorageConfig is set to All, you should define the configuration FaceSaveStrategy to specify which data will be stored. The following table describes options for FaceSaveStrategy configuration:

Save Strategy Option	Description
`FirstFace`	Only the first detected face of a person is stored.
`BestFace`	Only the best face for the detected person is stored. Which face is the best is decided when the person is lost from tracking.
`FirstFace and BestFace`	The first and the best face for the detected person are stored.
`All`	All faces for the detected person are stored.
`MatchedOnly`	Only faces which are matched against a watchlist member are stored.

The default value for FaceSaveStrategy is FirstFace and BestFace.

Define whether full frames are saved

It is also possible to configure whether SmartFace stores full frames for a detected person or not. Configuration of this option is in the property SaveFrameImageData with values true or false. The default value is true.