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Automatic Face Recognition Helps Tag Your Photo Collection
Managing a collection of digital photos on a PC isn't always easy. How should you arrange the folders and directories? Should the pictures of dad at your wedding be filed under dad, or wedding, or last June?
There are some great freeware applications available to help manage, sort, display and print all the images stored on your PC. Google's Picasa is one well-known example, and others include Irfanview and FastStone.
If it's a while since you last looked at such programs, you may have failed to notice the latest new feature. Namely, automatic face recognition. It's now possible to get free software which not only lets you view and print your pictures, but also attempts to automatically recognise people's faces.
One such example of this genre is the current version of Picasa (www.google.com/picasa). Once you've downloaded and installed it (it runs on all recent versions of Windows and the download is around 11 MB), it'll automatically start searching your PC for pictures. You can choose whether to search the entire machine, or just My Documents and the desktop. The face recognition feature is easy to use, and automatic. A pane on the left hand side lists all the people in your collection. At the start, this will be empty, so click on its top line to see all the unique faces that Picasa has found. Give each one a name, and the program then does the rest, gradually filling that pane with a list of people. Click on a name, and quickly view every picture of that person.
Picasa isn't the only program that can can do this. Fotobounce, available from www.fotobounce.com, runs on Mac OSX 10.5 and on all versions of Windows from XP upwards. It, too, has automatic face recognition, plus peer-to-peer facilities so you can share pictures online with friends, colleagues and family.
So, if you haven't updated your favourite photo viewer app for a while, check out the latest generation of software. You'll be amazed how useful it is to be able to find pictures of someone so quickly.
Also, for more of the best free photo organizer apps, see http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-digital-photo-organizer.htm.
Got an idea for a Hot Find? Let us know at http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/submit-product-review.htm.
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Comments
Interesting article, thanks! I wonder if there is any way to detect/recognize spot patterns of animals, especially toads, to identify them. Toads dwell in my backyard, and I'd like to know which is which. It is known that they each have unique spot patterns, on the belly, different from others'. That is, toad A's spot pattern is different from toad B's. Is it impossible to make Picasa or Fotobounce recognize animals' face or spot patterns? If it's impossible, is there any freeware that can do it?
I be trying Picasa with not a lot of good feeling. It is poorly programs and not easy to get out of computer. Google makes it check always for new version and it keeps information of your computer. Am suprise that some peoples seem to say they like program that can not be trust. Many program are much better and not take privacy away.
Awesome application, lol!!:)
Photology. No longer supported, still available.
Faces and more.
I love Picasa. Have been using it for a few years now. My favorite photos are on the web albums and if I have to travel travel and use a different computer for some reason, I just do a complete download with a single click. Even the face tags are synced. Simply amazing !
Harufy, Picassa in the past was a dodgy inefficient program with wuch to be desired. I had communication with the developer years ago and he was very rude and would not discuss the then version dropping hundreds of files all over the computer and its taking over of scanning and photo downloading with no clean uninstall. For those reasons I will never install it on my computer. Note, it is possibly better behaved nowadays, but with the availability of good photo software there is no need to ever go there. I have seen Picassa on other person computer and see no compelling reason to give it another chance. I use ThumbsPlus, Picture It 2000, Irfanview, Faststone, Paint Shop Pro, Sagelight, Photofiltre depending on what I need to do. So far I have not found a photo viewing, slideshow creating, photo editing job I cant do.
Anyone wanting free photo editing functions should try Faststone and Photfiltre. They can do some amazing work. If you want to move into the next level Thumbs Plus is without peer, even after many years and the inevitable imitators.
FOTOBOUNCE COMMENTS
I started to install Fotobounce and upon reading the agreement it is apparent that you are delivered advertising and also agree to sending them some of your information. Without more information, I am not prepared to have it on my computer.
For now I will just have to trust my memory for photo recognition. My old scanned family photos have the peoples names in the filename and this works well. I expect any automatic face recognotion will be of limited use to me with a collection of 150,000 high resolution photos with around 3,000 different people in the photos.
I was curious though how face recognition would work. I might just wait until someone I trust adds the plugin to their program.
Just to answer the query about Fotobounce related to advertising and info collection. The privacy policy is available here:
http://fotobounce.com/privacy-statement/
The collection of info is limited to improving the advertising content to better match your geography, and to help improve the program itself.
Please note that our only focus is photo indexing and sharing with the Fotobounce product. Our goal is to continually bring enhancements to our users and help slay the photo management problem that exists when you have thousands of images on your computer.
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Try it you will like it .... we have 10's of thousands of family photos, over several geneations, child to adult and Picasa catalogs and arranges them all. Amazing that it even recognizes similar family traits .... this is not a program to "edit" photos as mush as rather organize them with some real good simple editing features. Your inabilty to try the new sounds really, really old!
Thanks a bunch for this fine find. I tried out both Picasa and Fotobounce on my library of three thousand over photoes so far, and felt that Picasa works much better and easier to use than Fotobounce for the feature of face recognition.
Picasa is a great photo management software that I and other seniors have been using for some time.
A few tips on face recognition:
- it will take a while, possibly overnight running, to recognize all the faces. So first time editing will take a while if you have a lot of photos
- it will pickup faces in a crowd you will never know, even faces in photos or magazines that maybe in the photo.
A few general tips about Picasa:
- Typical of most Google products the user interface can appear 'different' or 'odd'. Do show some patience. The help system is good and there are plenty of sites with free tutorials.
- I suggest you don't try to rename photo files - just leave them as the camera named them. Rather use the combination of face recognition and tags. You can give the folder name something that gives a clue to its contents. With this approach the search facility in Picasa works brilliantly and very fast.
- do check at the Picasa site as to the latest version. Using update in Picasa will sometimes fail to install the new version and simply patch the existing one or show no updates available.
- the folder view and sort order can be confusing. There are 3 views and 4 sort option - see menu View / Folder View for all options. I prefer the flat folder view.
- the 'Folders' are the same folders you see in Windows. However, a folder will only appear in Picasa if it has at least one photo file in it AND Picasa has been configured to look in that area of Windows - see menu Tools / Folder Manager.
Hope this helps.
I like how I can easily create albums in Picasa and upload them to Picasa web albums. But I have found the Folder View and Sort Order frustrating. Thanks for these tips!
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