Exploring Excire

 I had gotten interested in Excire at the Visual Story Tellers on-line conference. It seemed to offer some useful features that might help me tackle the process of working through a lot of old family photos, slides, negatives and albums. Well, it didn’t inspire me to start that project. However, it is an amazing program.

The clearest use case for excire is during the import/ingestion of photos. It was faster than lightroom, but it does have to create its own database (like the lightroom catalogue) and it uses either a jpeg or the jpeg built into any RAW file.

The fact that it can write this keywording and your ranking to a sidecar file as you import is a really massive benefit.

I still think photo mechanic lets you get through the import a lot quicker, but I’m seldom adding keywords. Once you have entered custom keywords both do a great job of finding your photos.

The second great application is for searching through a large collection, where its hierarchical keywords strategy can help you find a lot of photos quickly within a larger collection. It also keywords several special terms related to aspects of the photograph, not things buried in the exif data (like lightroom) but general things like brightness, leading lines or silhouette.

Its biggest downfall for my “family history” project was that although you can put in customised to identify people and grouping people “like this” it misses enough to make it unreliable, as a fall-back organizer.  By comparison google photos gives me a slightly better strike rate once I identify people (or alternatively say not matching). Picasa (although no longer supported by google) still appears to me to do the best job and It works on photos locally.  I want to use the best tool, with assistance from picasa and photo mechanic for now.

So my conclusion is I’m not buying excire (just now). It is an impressive program and leads the way for AI classification and assistance in finding photos. It's definitely something to keep an eye on. There is a free seven-day trial if you are interested.           

tagging people

One of the most significant feature in Picasa 3.5 is the tools to recognize and tag people. It is essentially and expansion of the people tagging introduced into Picasa web Albums. The magic to its inclusion in Picasa 3.5 is that it will scan your collection of photos looking for individual faces, then group these photo so that similar faces are together. each group cab easily be identified by clicking on the add a name below the photo resenting that group and you have created an album for that person. Picasa will also look in gmail for contact details and add them to the album.

 

Once you have tagged a few people picasa will endeavour to add new faces to that album, if the match is only tentative you see a couple of conform icon under the tentative photo. Just click on the green plus to include of the red X to remove the photo from that person’s album.

Once enough photos are tagged the people button, pops up a person oriented search panel on the right hand side of the scene, which includes a handy thumbnail index of people. Uploading photos to your web album can even notify the people in the photos if you have their email addresses in their contact details. Fortunately people setting are not open to the public unless you allow such access.

It isn’t just picasa that had got on the people tagging band wagon. Flickr now has a new people feature. It is not as much gee-whiz fun as the picasa face recogniser and you have to manually identify your contacts in your photos. Ok that’s not exactly true because Your flickr friends can also manually identify themselves in your photos. Its basically fully public unless you opt for restriction on who can see or insert people tags.

Being able to tag & index your photos by the people in them is a truely great benefit, but some of that benefit may become a two edge sword, if all the family details or an embarrassing moment become named (& shamed) in public.