Im using a Pi 4 2GB model and trying to use the new face rec guide. BUT when I do this command: pip install face-recognition, it just gives me errors. Anyone know why?
Hi @Ethan298285,
Welcome to the forum!
Could you share a screenshot of the errors you’re seeing? Do they come up right away, or only after some time? That’ll help us narrow down what’s going on.
That said, the face-recognition library relies on dlib, which can be quite heavy to compile—especially on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB RAM. This often leads to build failures due to limited memory.
A quick fix that may help:
Temporarily increase the swap file size. This gives your Pi more virtual memory to work with during the build.
Here’s how to do it:
sudo dphys-swapfile swapoff
sudo sed -i 's/CONF_SWAPSIZE=.*/CONF_SWAPSIZE=1024/' /etc/dphys-swapfile
sudo dphys-swapfile setup
sudo dphys-swapfile swapon
Once you’ve done that, try installing again:
pip3 install face-recognition
After installation, it’s a good idea to set the swap size back to 100MB to avoid long-term performance issues.
If the project is critical and ongoing, a Pi 4 with 4GB or 8GB RAM—or even a Pi 5—will make a noticeable difference.
The face-recognition library depends on:
dlib(which requires CMake and compiles C++ code)cmake,boost,numpy, etc.
On a Raspberry Pi, especially with limited RAM, building dlib can easily fail unless everything is prepped correctly.
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