Why merge tracks

Pimloc Redact follows each person or object through the video and puts them in a row on the video timeline. If someone leaves the shot, turns away or is hidden for a moment, the tracking can lose them. When they come back, they can end up in a new row with a new label. One person can then be spread across several rows, such as Face 2, Face 23 and Face 99.

Merging puts all of those tracks into one row. It's most useful when you need to treat one person differently from everyone else. For example:

Unredact one person. If everyone else stays hidden but one person must be seen, merge all of their tracks first. Then one click on the eye unredacts them in every frame. See How to change redaction settings for a video or a single track.
Spotlight one person. Inverse blur keeps one person clear and hides everything else. Any track you miss is hidden with the rest of the frame, so merge their tracks before you turn it on. See How to spotlight a person with inverse blur.
Label one person. Give the merged row a name, such as "Witness", and the label is used for every track.
Check for missed detections. With every track in one row, step through them with the ‹ and › buttons next to the row's label, or press Alt + Left and Alt + Right. Each press jumps to the next start or end of a track. Check the gaps between tracks: if the person or object is on screen there, they have no box and aren't redacted. See Fill in the gaps between tracks or How to manually track a person or object.

Open the Merge tool

Start from the person you want to keep. Their row is the one the other tracks are merged into. There are three ways to open the tool.

From a box on the video. Click the person's box, then click Merge in the toolbar above it, or press I.

From the tools on the left. Select a box or a track, then click Merge. The tool is greyed out until something is selected.
From Search. Open Search in the tools on the left and hover over a person's tile. Click the Merge button in its top-right corner. See Find a person with Search below.

What the Merge panel shows

The top of the panel is headed Merging into. It shows the person you're merging into:

Their label. Click it to rename the person. Press Enter to save, or Esc to cancel.
The eye. Click it, or press R, to redact or unredact everyone in the row.
Their tracks. The dashed box shows a thumbnail for each of the person's tracks, in the order they appear in the video. Click a thumbnail to jump to that track.

On the timeline, the person's row moves to the top and has a dashed outline. It stays there, even if you filter the timeline, until you close the Merge panel.

The Merge panel stays on the same person while it's open, even if you select other boxes. To merge into someone else, click Merge on their box or tile. Click Merge in the tools on the left to close the panel.

Add tracks from the suggestions

Under Suggestions, Pimloc Redact shows the rows that could be the same person. It only suggests rows of the same type, such as faces, and leaves out rows that are on screen at the same time as the person. That's because one person can't be in two places at once.

Choose how the suggestions are ordered from the menu next to Suggestions:

Sort by similar puts the rows that look most like the person first. This is the default.
Sort by time puts the rows that appear closest to the person in the video first.

Click a suggestion to jump to it in the video and check it's the same person. Clicking a suggestion doesn't add it.

To add a suggestion, hover over its tile and click + in the top-right corner. All of its tracks move into the person's row, and its old row disappears from the timeline.

Add several suggestions at once

Tick the box in the top-left corner of each suggestion you want to add. You can also hold Cmd (Ctrl on Windows) and click a tile to tick it, or hold Shift and click to tick every tile in between.
Click Add 2 selected at the bottom of the panel. The button shows how many you've ticked.

The suggestions stay in the same order after you add some, so the tiles don't move while you work. To refresh the order, choose a sort from the menu again.

See every track in a suggestion

Some suggestion tiles have a stacked icon in the bottom-left corner. It means that row already has more than one track. The tile only shows the first one.

Hover over the stacked icon, or click it, to see a thumbnail of every track in that row. Click a thumbnail to jump to that track in the video. This helps you check that every track in the row is the right person before you add it.

The same stacked icon appears on tiles in Search.

Take a track back out

If you added a track by mistake, hover over its thumbnail under Merging into and click the down arrow. The track moves out into a new row of its own, without a label.

There's no undo for merging. Taking a track out doesn't put it back in its old row or give back its old label. You can't take out the last track.

Find a person with Search

Search in the tools on the left lists every person and object in the video as a tile. Type a label, such as "Face 12", to find someone. Hover over a tile and click Merge in its top-right corner to open the Merge panel for that person.

If the video has text detections, you can also open the Merge tool from a text search result. See How to find text and licence plates in a video.

Other ways to move tracks:

To move a single track to another row by dragging it, see Move a track to another row.
If the tracking followed the wrong person, see How to track an object.

Keyboard Shortcuts

I = Open the Merge panel for the selected box
R = Redact or unredact the selection
Cmd + click (Ctrl + click) = Tick or untick a suggestion
Shift + click = Tick every suggestion between the last one and this one
Enter / Esc (in the label) = Save or cancel the new label
Alt + Left / Right = Previous / next track in the selected row

For the rest of the editor's shortcuts, see Keyboard shortcuts.

How to merge tracks of the same person or object in Pimloc Redact