Picasa Supports DNG - but can we use the face tags as keywords?
Now, this is all well and good for Picasa users, but I use Lightroom to manage my images. What I had written previously still applies - I'd love to find a way to work this into my workflow! Fortunately, the Picasa software supports popular RAW formats - including the Adobe DNG format. This means that you can turn Picasa loose on your image library and let it identify people in your photographs.
But - Picasa doesn't seem to save the name tags in the metadata of the files... this is a bummer, since it means we can use the tagging in other applications. Ideally, you would want the head tags to be added as keywords in some standard format - say person:first_last or something like that. I'm not too familiar with the ins and outs of Picasa, so this may be possible - more experimentation is necessary (I've not seen it in any obvious place so far). Another possibility would be to write a quick script that will automate the process of reading the head tags from Picasa and then updating the image EXIF with the keywords...
If anyone does, or knows of a way to do something like this please post in the comments!
About the Face Recognition Feature Performance
After downloading the software I let Picasa import the DNGs of a large wedding I'm currently working on... well over a thousand photos containing tons of faces and totaling 30GB or so. First thing to note: this is going to take a very... long... time. That's fine by me - I'd prefer that Picasa take the time to really look hard at the photos and figure out who's in them. Even if it works through the night, it'll certainly finish before I could - if it wasn't such a monumental task as to prevent my even attempting it in the first place!
The way the process works is pretty straightforward: Picasa scans all images and looks for FACES. If it knows that face, it'll take a shot at automatically tagging it. Otherwise, it will add the face to the "Album of Unnamed People" - a potter's field where you can go to assign names to faces. Clicking on a face will allow you to assign a name; from there Picasa will take this hint and apply it to the rest of the faces it has seen. The software appears to "learn" as it goes, so once you start giving it a few hints it'll get better and better at identifying the folks it comes across - in spite of lighting, pose or even focus (not that there are many of those... er... well, perhaps a few).
So like I said - this will take some time. Picasa has been chugging away in the background burning through CPU cycles (2.8GHz core 2 duo w/ 6MB cache & 4GB ram)... it is only 10% through analyzing the 30GB of images in the hour or so it has been running. The results look promising thus far & I'm sure this will be a great tool once we figure out how to extract the information from Picasa and embed it into the metadata.
Congrats to the Google Picasa team on a job well done & thanks for this great new feature!
5 comments:
after you have found all the mugs in picasa, you can select all shots of one person and add a "real" tag to it. If you have jpg's you can save them to the files and lightroom should be able to find them i suppose (had no time to test it yet). Now only a way to do the same for my raw pics.
As far as I can tell, this works only when logged in, and the identification may actually be done on the remote servers...
In other words, Picasa may be uploading a bunch of your pictures to be recognized without asking you, and that means your friends and clients' biometric data is then collected in a central DB they may not be interested to be in, not could they erase themselves from it. I'm not comfortable at all with that idea :-(
Ira - I'm pretty sure I've done this while not logged in and it works just fine. I am also fairly certain that the recognition is being done locally.
Perhaps you've been watching too many movies lately!
whoops - hit the wrong button in the moderation page for Ira's response. Here it is:
OK checked again, you're right. it's working offline as well.
As for Paranoia, I which it was that simple. I'm on the team fighting the government Biometric DB here in Israel, a really bad law that was just passed last week after a long fight, and we are now considering taking this to the supreme court to render it illegal, but it's a pretty slow and scary process till we get there...
Ira - that's very interesting. Good luck!
I found that AvPicFaceXmpTagger_1.4.exe takes the picasa face detect results and embeds the data in the .jpg meta data using exif tool.
Its an extra step in the process but greatly speeds up rescanning by other machines needing to use the same data without the entire scanning process to be rerun on each, in my case 30+ hours 160k files.
Ripple
Phat Ratt Motorcycle Photography
www.PhatRatt.com
Golden, Co.
Post a Comment