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Picture software solution, facial recognition and auto tags?


Trouble Maker

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So my partner works at a school and they take a lot of pictures. They go through them, find the good pictures of 1 kid in the picture and add it to their portfolio. But some parents have asked if they can have every picture their kid are in (in electronic form).

 

She uses Picasa now which I believe she can manually tag each photo with any tag she wants, for example every person in the picture. Then filter it out for each tag (person), copy all of those pictures into another folder to give to each parent. The problem is to tag all of the pictures manually takes too much time.

 

With facial recognition software becoming more common, I thought this might be a solution. You could have some plug-in, or standalone software which can do this automatically. You could have a ‘base’ picture of each person, a head shot of a blank background basically. If it’s too cumbersome or awkward to do this, then you could just find a few good face shots in regular pictures that you’ve taken. Then it uses this as a basis to create a facial recognition filter that automatically tags each picture where it recognizes a person. Obviously this won’t be perfect. There are a lot of different things that could cause an issue, like if there isn’t enough of the persons face in the picture to get enough points to make a match. Even if imperfect it would automate a decent amount of the work.

 

So, is there any add-ins to Picasa, or any other software out there that does this?

 

You could even think bigger picture than this and have it auto-tag by recognizing objects in much the same way, or even location (no just geo-location, but that x GPS is Grandmas house) and the dates/times I assume are already in the exif data. In theory this could all be built into the camera, but it’s probably easier to do in software on the computer.

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I don't use software that does this personally but know that it works pretty well. last I did was many years ago and it was great. The key to her decision needs to also strongly consider the database and it's design. The reason I stopped using what I did was because it was driven off a weak database that would no way support the image counts I have. Hopefully the newer items are much more solid.
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I may be missing something important here, but are we looking for software that scans photos for faces and groups those people together?

 

Apple iPhoto and Aperture both have this feature, and it works fantastically. Once you select a few good shots it gives you a batch of thumbnails of the face it thinks is the one you are trying to select, then you confirm the correct ones by clicking them or clicking and dragging over large groups of correct ones.

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I may be missing something important here, but are we looking for software that scans photos for faces and groups those people together?

 

What I used it for was to quickly tag all images that say contained my son with his name. Thus I can direct it to scan a directory of images and it would look at photos and tag those with Nicholas in them, with his name. If my dog Ares appeared, it would also add that tag.

 

Basically, what I know is out there now is software to do that. Quickly tag images based on similarity. I've not researched it for a while though.

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What I used it for was to quickly tag all images that say contained my son with his name. Thus I can direct it to scan a directory of images and it would look at photos and tag those with Nicholas in them, with his name. If my dog Ares appeared, it would also add that tag.

 

Basically, what I know is out there now is software to do that. Quickly tag images based on similarity. I've not researched it for a while though.

 

Yes.

 

Picture 1 has Bobby in it. Tag - Bobby

Picture 2 has Bobby and Susie in it. Tags - Bobby, Susie

Picture 3 has Susie and Joe in it. Tags - Susie, Joe.

 

Search for Bobby, and you get picture 1 and 2. Search for Susie and you get picture 2 and 3.

 

I want it to auto tag based on facial recognition so you don't have to manually tag hundreds of pictures.

 

Apple iPhoto and Aperture both have this feature, and it works fantastically.

 

Is this what you are talking about? I know so far that Picasa does this, but she still needs to try it out so we don't know how well it works. But if another program does this well, then it could be worth a try.

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Yes.

 

Picture 1 has Bobby in it. Tag - Bobby

Picture 2 has Bobby and Susie in it. Tags - Bobby, Susie

Picture 3 has Susie and Joe in it. Tags - Susie, Joe.

 

Search for Bobby, and you get picture 1 and 2. Search for Susie and you get picture 2 and 3.

 

I want it to auto tag based on facial recognition so you don't have to manually tag hundreds of pictures.

 

Is this what you are talking about? I know so far that Picasa does this, but she still needs to try it out so we don't know how well it works. But if another program does this well, then it could be worth a try.

 

I'll look today to see if I can find out more info for you. Perhaps it's time I reconsider using something like this too.

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I'll look today to see if I can find out more info for you. Perhaps it's time I reconsider using something like this too.

Her use seems like a perfect test for robustness so I will let you know how it goes.

Yah picasr does do this, but it's a bit persnickety at times. I have used it, but I wasn't impressed with it

Do you know if it was with 3.5 or 3.6? It was introduced with 3.5 and supposedly improved with 3.6. Again, I will let you all know how the trials go! :)

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Is this what you are talking about? I know so far that Picasa does this, but she still needs to try it out so we don't know how well it works. But if another program does this well, then it could be worth a try.

I believe so. Apple calls this "Faces" so when I click on the Faces tab I see all of the faces I care enough about to have named. So, for example, I have one for my girlfriend. From any project, album, or my entire library I can pull up the search box, and under the "Faces" search field type in her name and it shows all of the pictures of her. I can't seem to find a way to tell it that I want to see all photos of her and myself, or any other combination, but I could be missing something.

 

You don't have to manually tag every photo, but you do need to confirm the faces it thinks are a correct match. It puts the best matches at the top of the thumbnails so you can simply click and drag over them all until you get to some of the wrong ones near the bottom. Then option-clicking says the match is incorrect.

 

Here is apple's page about it

http://www.apple.com/aperture/features/#faces

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  • 2 weeks later...

Went through the initial setup last weekend. It automatically recognized 2k faces in I don't know how many pictures, a lot. She started tagging people and sometimes that number would drop by 30, sometimes by just the 1 she tagged. Didn't take too long. The real test will be when they upload some new photos, how many will it auto-recognize?

 

It's pretty cool because they've already come up with some completely new ideas for how to do their portfolios since the parents will get most of the photos in electronic format. They won't feel like the parents 'missed out' if they don't put a good but not amazing photo in the portfolio, so they can focus on the really good ones and put more of a story to it.

 

It recognized some dolls faces, pretty funny but kind of creepy too!

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