One of the best ways to sort digital photos these days is to tag them. Not only do tags help with sorting the photos, they make viewing photos of certain people or events easier. The only hassle involved is the time it takes to actually apply tags, especially if there are lots of people in the photos. If only there was a more “automatic” way to do it….
There just might be that more automatic tagging system available, starting today with an updated Google Picasa. According to Stephen Shankland over at a CNET News Blog, Underexposed, Google is set to launch a face recognition feature for their Picasa Web Albums today at noon (pacific). Shankland describes the feature saying, “the “name tag” feature presents users with collections of photos with what it judges to be the same person, then lets them click a button to affix a name. Once photographic subjects are named, users can browse an album of that individual on the fly.”
I remember when Ryan decided he wanted to tag all of our photos. It took him many, many hours to go through the thousands of photos we have to get them all tagged. It was such a hassle, so it’s understandable why people simply don’t take the time to tag their photos. This new feature that Google is introducing with Picasa should make tagging something that more people use, more often.We haven’t been able to try the feature ourselves, but Shankland said it took him less than 15 minutes to tag about 200 faces in a set of over 100 photos. He says that included the set-up time too, with figuring out how it all works. Not bad.
As a side note, this feature is available to Picasa users thanks to the Google acquisition of “Neven Vision” back in 2006. It’s always nice to see how Google ends-up using the services that they buy.
we all know how the first face recognition service ended up (Riya).
and i do wish there new likeness service will do something more useful soon.
but since google has more resources, does it mean we will soon see more automated recognition of other things?
i wonder.
microsoft, and i think at least another company, working on automated location recognition, not with GPS, but with features like building and such.
that, and objects and color tagging will b cool 2.
Sounds promising. I’m working on the same thing Ryan was working on right now. Still have to go through 2004 – 2008
Ryan, did you ever write an article about that? I’m using Exifer to apply the (IPTC) tags locally, which usually get picked up by Flickr Uploadr, but not always. I’m trying to find a better method of applying tags to photos and have them come up in all (online) applications I’m using.
I use ACDSee for my tagging needs. In total, I have about 14k photos tagged. Besides all of the advanced features ACDSee has, it offers a few most other photo management apps don’t, the ability to do both AND and OR searches, as well as the ability to write your tags to EXIF info or vice versa. It’ll let you map what “fields” they go into. I use that so my uploaded photos are tagged when going to Fotki. It’ll also let you export all of your tagging work to a standard XML file which should make it easier to switch photo apps if you choose to do so at a later date.
I’d love to use ACDSee for tagging, but I couldn’t find a way to easily mass-edit photos with IPTC keywords. These are the only keywords Flickr understands for their tags (and I prefer not to do the work twice
).
Not sure if this helps, but there’s an ACDSee forum topic on what I think you’re referring to here – [forums.acdsystems.com]
It states:
“Use the “batch set information” under the batch command, you can then set the catorgories and key words in the database to write a IPTC to the file.”
I don’t blame you on not wanting to do it twice, that’s why I use it for retaining Fotki tags.
It’s a long, tedious process, isn’t it?
A more automated tagging system is definitely a step in the right direction. I think we’ll see a lot more of this automation coming soon.
I’m using iPhoto to apply all of my tags, and then have a Flickr uploading app that integrates into iPhoto which applies tags as they are uploaded. It was a very tedious process, but well worth it when I look back.
Bill:
Then I found out I could do it with Bridge too, and also Lightroom, in an easier, faster way too. Happy with that for now 
Yeah that helped, I found out I’d need ACDSee Pro
Ashley:
Sure is a long, tedious process! Especially those years, as I have much more digital/digitized pics there. I definitely think it’s worth it, as I already love being able to find/show/share photos by tag on Flickr (locally I’m starting to appreciate it too).
Ryan:
Ah, no Mac here, so I’ll do with LR or Bridge for now then. Face recognition would be very welcome in those apps too (or on Flickr, but that probably won’t potentially sync back to the local files, while I imagine Picasa will at some point).