11. MediaShow 5: Analysis

I’m spending so much time describing what’s wrong with MediaShow 5 because CyberLink came so close to having an incredible, mind-blowing face tagger. All of the right pieces are here. They just weren’t tied together tightly enough. I’m not even going to take you through the manual auding/editing process because it’s so similar to the process found in iPhoto, right down to having to having stray body parts tagged as faces.

After the 5-minute initial analysis, I spent 25 minutes going through the first wave of Pending groups, most of which had only one image in them. I probably could have shaved three to five minutes off of this stage if I’d better understood how to use the Skip All feature in conjunction with the group thumbnails down the right edge, but I only really grasped this after my initial run-through. The auditing/editing process took another 24 minutes. This stage is your time sink, filled with a lot of unnecessary clicking and delay because the UI hasn’t been optimized for these incredibly repetitive tasks. It’s as if CyberLink spent all of its energy on the grouping stage and merely copied Apple for auditing, which means that MediaShow copied all of iPhoto’s design flaws but nearly none of its advantages. Every click is another second or two wasted, and it adds up in a hurry. This is much of why my tagging run through MediaShow took a total of 54 minutes compared to 37 in iPhoto.

Explanation: I’m going to give CyberLink the benefit of the doubt on accuracy based on screen captures I’ve seen of other people’s MediaShow sessions and assume that my test collection is on the left edge of the accuracy bell curve. And again, even the accuracy I saw first-hand would be good enough if the face tagging UI were more flexible and allowed for fast group clumping by the user. I’ll keep saying it: The UI is the tagging bottleneck, not analysis speed. CyberLink is one revision away from having an overall 4 or 4.5 if it can streamline its interface and get the user more involved in the association process.

I worry that this review paints MediaShow 5 in an overly negative light, so let me be clear. This is a decent, useful program. As you spend more time with it and learn how to better use the tools it offers, you’ll discover ways to trim time off the tagging process and improve your overall experience. But being in the position to take a comparative look at the product, I’m just frustrated because MediaShow 5 could have been awesome and instead is only good. It’s like when your kid gets a B on a test even though he knew enough to get an A. You still love and praise him, but you nudge him to try harder next time.