A method of identifying at least one particular person of interest in a collection of digital images taken over time, includes providing the collection of digital images with each digital image containing one or more persons; storing in a digital database an appearance model having a set of features that are distance measurements associated with facial features of the particular person of interest at an associated time; and providing an individual recognition classifier that uses the appearance model and the associated time to identify the particular person of interest in images from the collection of digital images.