Since I have over 800 models on my commercial site, I am sometimes at a loss to find a particular model if I am presented with a picture which seems familiar but which is not identified. Somebody told me that maybe I could use Picasa's face recognition feature.
So I've downloaded Picasa for Mac. But the interface is a mystery to me (it does not even show me a file's name). And I don't see any obvious way I could show the app a picture and say "find pictures with the same face". Does anybody know if this can be done?
17 comments:
iPhoto now has face recognition.
I could be wrong, but I tried Picasa for this precise feature a little while ago.
In VERY simple terms, what it does initially is scan ALL photos on your system (unless you opt otherwise). It will then group SIMILAR pictures, and present you with an option to label / tag them with a name ... which is applied to ALL of that selection.
Unfortunately, it's a very blunt tool :-( ... unless of course, someone knows better ? :-)
Picasa is so easy to use you may think it is blunt, but in fact it is quite powerful. I've been using it for quite some time and can tell you that the more time you spend with it, the more you will discover.
If you want to show picasa a face and have it find more of the same person... Put a picture of the model in question in a temporary folder and let picasa find it.
In picasa, double click on the image.
Click the People button (lower right hand corner).
Click Add Person Manually.
Picasa will start to find similar faces and out them into the Unnamed folder in the People album.
The above is for a PC, I'm not sure how different it will be on a MAC, but it should be close.
Thanks, Bill.
How do I steer Picasa to find the picture I want?
... Well, it seems I can use the Open command...
... OK, I had to find a picture of somebody I knew it had scanned already, because naturally it's taking it a loooong time to scan the many hundreds of models on my disk.
But it does have *some* workability at least! I opened a pic of a model it had scanned (the model, but I don't think that pic), cropped it and mon-toned it, and opened it in Picasa, and it immediate found the right name for her!
Now how do I close the little palette which tells me it's scanning, even when P is in the background? I keep closing it with the X, but it keeps re-opening immediately!
... Hmmm, I'm having less luck with Michelle Trachtenberg. I saw Picasa scanning a few pics I have of her, and I then found a new one on the web, and loaded it. But even after I named her, it did not find the other pictures of her.
It strikes me that maybe it can only find matching files if the model in those files has already been named?
That's inconvenient, it means I have to name a thousand models by hand.
...No, that don't even do it. I can't even repeat that first success now.
(That interface is really weird to me. It must be a Windows import.)
Unnamed, but similar faces get grouped together in the People album. You will have to name all models by hand because picasa cannot guess the names by itself. Even if you had a file named jane.jpg picasa would still put it in the unnamed album because it doesn't know that jane is a name.
There is some info here:
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=14609
and here:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa?hl=en&utm_source=HC&utm_medium=leftnav&utm_campaign=picasa
I do realize that Picasa can't guess the name.
But it does not seem to group anybody anymore for me, named or unnamed.
Perhaps the are too many faces for it to deal with. I have a little over 20,000 pictures on my computer (mostly non-people) and it does take a long time for picasa to process new faces. Every time it sees a new photo it has to scan everything to see who that person is.
There are still times though when it seems to never figure out who someone is. Then I have to add manually.
What if you let it run overnight? Maybe then it will have things sorted out.
Bill: curious: have you tried any other photo-sharing site besides Picasa? I was wondering if you preferred it, say, over Flickr? I wasn't particularly fond of Flickr, myself.
I would appreciate your feedback.
Oh and...enjoyed your blog, too, BTW! :-)
I haven't used the Picasa *site* yet.
Eolake said...
"I haven't used the Picasa *site* yet."
Well...I'd sure like to hear feedback from you, too, if and when you do. I'm still trying to figure out which one to use.
I've tried PhotoBucket and Shutterfly but...don't know of any other that work too well for sharing. :-(
Thanks for the compliment about my site, TC [Girl].
I use picasa to manage pix on my computer. I use smugmug.com for online sharing and prints.
I do NOT like flickr, and I'm not very fond of the picasa web albums site. Haven't tried anything else.
What I like about smugmug is the easy user interface and the ease of which friends and family can order prints. Print quality is excellent, and so is customer support.
Smugmug also has pro level accounts which makes things very easy if you sell prints or stock photos for a living.
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