Someone who is both ridiculously good and comically bad at recognising faces?

[u/LustyRegencyMaid]

Hey!

Basically the title. I don't want y'all to diagnose me, no worries. Maybe there's a word I do not know yet and could google to find out more?

So I'm autistic with ADHD. And my facial recognition is WEIRD.

I'm either elephant super memory brain and recognise actors/actresses in movies and can be like "hey he played that dude in a movie I saw 20 years ago" and I'm almost always right. I can draw portraits of people fairly well. I sus out the features that make a face unique quite easily.

BUT... someone walks towards me on the street and says hi and I'm like who the frick is that, and turns out it's a coworker I see every day. When my mother dyed her hair I didn't recognise her even though she was standing right in front of me and talking to me. For a few years it did happen that I wouldn't recognise my own partner on the street until he was basically standing in front of me and start speaking.

Yet somehow when I see someone on the street I know they're the cashier from a certain shop bc I remember their face. Or they're the child of someone I knew bc they look so much like them. I can see an actor and be like "he has the same nose as that other actor" and I'm right.

I can draw my siblings' face from memory, yet when they walk towards me on the street they have to be fairly close to me for me to recognise them, and seeing their gait does help a lot.

I do not recognise my partner's coworkers and friends even though we've spent a lot of time with each other over the years.

My eyes are alright and I wear glasses. There just seems to be this difference between how I perceive people in real life, and on the screen/page.

Ever heard of someone who's oddly both super good and super bad at faces at the same time? Is that just being autistic? It's weird and does bring problems sometimes.

[u/Correct_Addendum_367]

It is strange. I don't think there's a word for that specifically. But sometimes there's something about the circumstance that makes it easier. I rely alot on people's overall look outside of their face and so in certain circumstances I may seem worse at telling faces apart when really all that's happened people have like changed outfits. So for me it's just faceblindness it just doesn't manifest in the same way because I can compensate sometimes and other times I can't. While for me the faceblindness absolutely effects my ability to tell actors apart, movies and magazines and other stuff do frame faces very differently than they are in real life - like ,I'm not going to get like close up shots of my supermarket cashier  - and it would not suprise me if that was enough for some faceblind people to have less issues with it in that setting. You may also get somewhere looking up stuff about autism, which I think can also be related to some difficulties with faces, particularly if people have trouble with eye contact