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Picasa is addictive
Feb. 17th, 2011 07:36 amI left my machine running overnight Tuesday night to index photos, then slept it while I was at work yesterday. When I got home I started playing with identifying faces. Within an hour, I had Jenn, then later Kate, standing behind me as we all identified faces. Next thing I knew it was after 9PM. Then this morning I started the machine up since it had even more indexing it wanted to do, and when Picasa came up, there were a couple of faces I knew right there on front, and soon it was 20 minutes later and I was deep into flipping through pictures again. So I was a bit late leaving for work. I could easily sit there for days working on it.
It's certainly not perfect, it does sometimes not identify people you'd think it should, and sometimes it identifies people incorrectly, but that's relatively rare. It's really quite good, and I've already identified thousands of faces; it's typical for it to find > 100 of a family member at a time, and I just need to scroll through them all and click "yes, those are all her" or perhaps click the "X" on a few faces that aren't, then click "confirm all" on the rest.
There are some it's having trouble with; there are a couple of kids at church that look very similar, and in fact I can't reliably tell them apart, and it's mixing them up. Also my brother's first ex and one of her daughters are fairly massively mixed up, and I need to sort those out, but even so it's easier than if I'd been doing them all manually. In the general case the face recognition probably cuts out at least 98% of the workload, since it is correct at least that much of the time.
It's certainly not perfect, it does sometimes not identify people you'd think it should, and sometimes it identifies people incorrectly, but that's relatively rare. It's really quite good, and I've already identified thousands of faces; it's typical for it to find > 100 of a family member at a time, and I just need to scroll through them all and click "yes, those are all her" or perhaps click the "X" on a few faces that aren't, then click "confirm all" on the rest.
There are some it's having trouble with; there are a couple of kids at church that look very similar, and in fact I can't reliably tell them apart, and it's mixing them up. Also my brother's first ex and one of her daughters are fairly massively mixed up, and I need to sort those out, but even so it's easier than if I'd been doing them all manually. In the general case the face recognition probably cuts out at least 98% of the workload, since it is correct at least that much of the time.
