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Having had some issues with Picasa face tagging I frittered away this afternoon looking for an alternative (of which there aren't many, facial recognition still being one of those "We're working on it" fields). So I found, downloaded and installed Fotobounce (an Adobe Air application, although this isn't obvious on their website).
Their algorithm detected more frontal* and fewer side on faces than Picasa in the 550-odd batch of photos I threw at it, but also returned more false positives. It was nowhere near as good at making suggestions and grouping similar photos.
* how much of this may be due to Picasa aborting indexing is anyone's guess
Below is what I wrote in their feedback from, preserved for posterity.
~~~
I like:
- Persistent data stored near photos so I can reinstall the application/Windows system without losing hours of tagging work (not as good as stored in the .jpg itself, but close enough for my needs)
- Able to maintain multiple completely separate libraries
- Able to completely delete reference to a thumbnail of someone I won't know rather than 'ignore' it (and delete all unidentified faces in a photo) (but an option for 're-analyse image' to restore these on an image by image basis would be nice)
I had issues with:
- Everything in subfolders being dragged up into a gallery. Kind of useful where I keep photos from other people in a named subfolders, not at all useful when it pulls in Picasa's 'Originals' folder (includes a whole lot of pre-rotation images which don't even register faces)
- Similarly, no obvious way to exclude a subfolder from the library
- No way to add information to a 'People' - like if you later find out you've been spelling it wrong, or learn someones surname/preferred nickname. Its easy enough to select all and add to a new person, but then:
- No way to delete a 'People' name which no longer has images in it, resulting from the previous or next items
Update: a correction to the previous two points.
- When entering a name and suggestions are popping up it's natural to see the first brightest item as being highlighted rather than the next grayed one. Thus I assumed that the default selected item was 'New Person' and would 'Select' this rather than the correct suggestion. This would lead to duplicate 'People' with partially completed names. It would also cause confusion as to which was selected if there were only two or three suggestions (which in my test run of about 550 images was frequently)
- Requirement to hit 'enter' to show you are finished typing a name. The number of times early on I typed a name then clicked on a crosshair only to have the name disappear ....
- Requirement to actually click on the pencil icon to start editing a name. I frequently clicked on the word "Unidentified" as the cursor changed to a text bar. Surely that entire area could be made clickable.
I know focus automatically goes to the box, but my series of actions tended to be 'click the pencil icon on the thumbnail', 'while hand is on mouse move up/over to adjust crosshairs', 'click name area to start entering name','type name','[enter][enter] to save', 'return hand to mouse'.
- Duplicate detection of the same face in a photo, one box a few pixels larger than the other but from the same center point. Even more underwhelming was that these duplicate faces were not then given as suggestions when the other one was named. This happened on many photos.
I noticed:
Your terms & conditions on installation say 'Do not install this beta product after March 2009' or something similar (obviously I ignored this). You might want to update that.
Looking forward to your next release (I see version 2 is in the works) which will hopefully address some of these issues and be a really useful tool.
Regards,
MArsden
marsden.marsden@gmail.com
Their algorithm detected more frontal* and fewer side on faces than Picasa in the 550-odd batch of photos I threw at it, but also returned more false positives. It was nowhere near as good at making suggestions and grouping similar photos.
* how much of this may be due to Picasa aborting indexing is anyone's guess
Below is what I wrote in their feedback from, preserved for posterity.
~~~
I like:
- Persistent data stored near photos so I can reinstall the application/Windows system without losing hours of tagging work (not as good as stored in the .jpg itself, but close enough for my needs)
- Able to maintain multiple completely separate libraries
- Able to completely delete reference to a thumbnail of someone I won't know rather than 'ignore' it (and delete all unidentified faces in a photo) (but an option for 're-analyse image' to restore these on an image by image basis would be nice)
I had issues with:
- Everything in subfolders being dragged up into a gallery. Kind of useful where I keep photos from other people in a named subfolders, not at all useful when it pulls in Picasa's 'Originals' folder (includes a whole lot of pre-rotation images which don't even register faces)
- Similarly, no obvious way to exclude a subfolder from the library
- No way to add information to a 'People' - like if you later find out you've been spelling it wrong, or learn someones surname/preferred nickname. Its easy enough to select all and add to a new person, but then:
- No way to delete a 'People' name which no longer has images in it, resulting from the previous or next items
Update: a correction to the previous two points.
- When entering a name and suggestions are popping up it's natural to see the first brightest item as being highlighted rather than the next grayed one. Thus I assumed that the default selected item was 'New Person' and would 'Select' this rather than the correct suggestion. This would lead to duplicate 'People' with partially completed names. It would also cause confusion as to which was selected if there were only two or three suggestions (which in my test run of about 550 images was frequently)
- Requirement to hit 'enter' to show you are finished typing a name. The number of times early on I typed a name then clicked on a crosshair only to have the name disappear ....
- Requirement to actually click on the pencil icon to start editing a name. I frequently clicked on the word "Unidentified" as the cursor changed to a text bar. Surely that entire area could be made clickable.
I know focus automatically goes to the box, but my series of actions tended to be 'click the pencil icon on the thumbnail', 'while hand is on mouse move up/over to adjust crosshairs', 'click name area to start entering name','type name','[enter][enter] to save', 'return hand to mouse'.
- Duplicate detection of the same face in a photo, one box a few pixels larger than the other but from the same center point. Even more underwhelming was that these duplicate faces were not then given as suggestions when the other one was named. This happened on many photos.
I noticed:
Your terms & conditions on installation say 'Do not install this beta product after March 2009' or something similar (obviously I ignored this). You might want to update that.
Looking forward to your next release (I see version 2 is in the works) which will hopefully address some of these issues and be a really useful tool.
Regards,
MArsden
marsden.marsden@gmail.com
