The neverending project

[johnridley]

I've begun digging into one of the many boxes of photos/negatives that my mom has given me. They've been sitting untouched for years now because there was no end-game; that is, after I scanned them, then what? I have a bunch of photos that I don't know who they're of, and even those I know, I have no good way to mark who they're of.

Now that I've got Picasa and face tagging, I've got a reason to scan them again.

Here's what we need now: Picasa already has the face tagging values in a text format, defining rectangles on the photo and linking them to an entry in the contact list. What we need is a standard EXIF tag for embedding tagging rectangles and names, and for that matter let's add an EXIF comment tag, for embedding captions and tagging information directly into the photo.

Here's the current pile I'm up against. There's pretty much everything in there. 120 in several aspect ratios, 126, 110, 35mm, B&W color, tintypes, my grandmother's membership card in Oddfellows, my other grandmother's ID card.

Comments

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what EXIF looks like. Is there a field (or more than one) available where captions or tags could be stuffed, say by a script?

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

EXIF is the meta-data in JPG photos. On digital cameras it always contains things like time/date taken, exposure info (shutter speed, f/ stop, brand/model of camera, flash on, metering mode, ISO speed, focal length, for SLRs it'll tell what lens was mounted. There's actually a heck of a lot of info in there, probably at least 30 or 40 items.

If the photo was taken with an iPhone or a newer camera that supports it, it probably also contains a geotag, which indicates the GPS coordinate of where it was taken.

I just did a little googling and it turns out there is already a defined comment tag, though I haven't seen much software that supports it (or at least, that makes it obvious that it does).

AFAIK nobody's defined face tagging yet. Though I suppose you could just add it as a comment. A pair of unsigned short integer (0-65535) for each X and Y indicating upper left/lower right corners of a rectangle in percentage of the entire photo, then a name.

Heh, I just did a little more googling, and I found threads on the Picasa boards complaining about face tagging not being saved in the EXIF data, and other people saying "stop complaining, this is cutting edge and there's not even a standard for face tagging yet."

I think I'm safe in continuing to use Picasa, and some day there will be a standard and at that point I can have Picasa push the data into the EXIF (or use a utility to do so). Until then my data is somewhat captive to Picasa, though I've looked at the data and it's pretty darned easy to see how it works, they didn't try to obfuscate it at all. So if I decided to break from Picasa at some point, I'd have no trouble writing a PERL script to move the data to some other standard format.

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

How did Picasa fair on that clown photo?

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Haven't given it to it yet. It's me at about age 9 I think.