Face.com Photo Tagger

By William Van Winkle, published on October 5, 2009
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: , , | Themes: Software

12. Face.com Photo Tagger

If I was handing out a Most Intriguing But Scary Award, it would go to Face.com. Our excursion here starts with the company’s Photo Tagger application for Facebook. If you’ve ever done photo tagging in Facebook, you know it’s a fairly tedious process, requiring manual selection of each face and manual name entry if the person isn’t on your Friends checklist. Photo Tagger does exactly what you’d expect: analysis of your photo albums and assistance with the tagging process.


The application only went into public alpha last July, and currently you have to either be invited by a current user or put your name on the waiting list at Face.com. But once you’re in, the click-through process is much like any other. You install the app on your Facebook page, give it permission to do whatever the User Agreement says, and point Photo Tagger at one of your photo albums. The software proceeds to scan your images, and because the processing is done on Facebook’s servers, there is hardly any impact on your local system resources—a noteworthy benefit over client-side tools like MediaShow 5. Better still, analysis is surprisingly fast. I couldn’t get an exact number on the time needed for my 300-image collection because Facebook imposed a 200-image limit per album, but an estimate based on the 200-picture album puts a theoretical 300-item scan time at roughly 3 minutes 10 seconds. Note that Photo Tagger will analyze an album every time it opens it, but these follow-up scans only take a few seconds unless you’ve dumped many more images into the album.


When your album analysis is complete, you’ll see a results page that looks something like this:



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Comments

liemfukliang 10/06/2009 5:29 AM
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Please update more on:
1. let just say I have spend weekly time on a low end pc to get 33 GB photo with so many file. How do I save this tag when I am reinstall windows?
2. About the portabilty in no 1. Picasa has picasa.ini in every folder, but when it corrupt, the picasa.ini is not helpful recovering the weekly time spent.
3. Speed? Why there is no benchmark graph like usual?
4. Try gradiation photos or something similiar. It will see about the acuration.
5. I want to get the best speed, what is the most needed hardware. If Processor will I7 better than C2D? If GPU, will Geforce GTX 295 better than 9800?

I have private paint experience using picasa. I have taging many face in a week of Sempron 2800+ OC to 2 Ghz. When the face recognation is done, for what ever reason, my cpu is dead (dead power electricity). When the electricity power is up, my pc is on windows. The picasa is corrupt. My one week OC is for nothing. DAMN :((.

deadlockedworld 10/06/2009 9:23 AM
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I recently tagged all my photos with Picasa. I think i personally tagged more than the software did--the software is VERY cautious. It also repeatedly asked to tag posters, even paintings that were on my walls. Finally, it doesn't do well with babies--which is no surprise because they all look the same to me too :-)

Its cool, but im not sure the outcome was worth sitting there tagging hundreds of pictures of ex-girlfriends.

testerie 10/06/2009 11:37 AM
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I am giving comment for testing.

Tomsguiderachel 10/06/2009 6:41 PM
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Deadlockedworld--you don't have to tag everyone in every album in Picasa--just don't tag albums that have your exes in them. I definitely don't tag everyone in my photos--only those people that are important to me.

Anonymous 10/06/2009 8:48 PM
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Adobe's Photoshop Elements 7 has the ability to detect faces but not automatically match them. It did make tagging much quicker. I could select 40 pictures from a party and tag the lot all at once.

However, I found that there were several pictures that it didn't catch. So, I ended up having to go through the whole bunch manually anyway to catch the stragglers. I found I spent as much time, if not more, making sure I got everything. So, I'm not sure that the "helpful tool" actually did much.

Anonymous 10/07/2009 11:29 AM
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I am using iPhoto '09 and I found that the predictive tagging is getting less and less accurate as the database of tagged faces increases. Impression confirmed by one of my friends using the same app. For example, my wife is probably the most frequent face in my collection and the software has a hard time identifying her. On the other hand, I tagged the face of a friend I see rarely and I was welcomed with 4-5 good matches.

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