14. Photo Tagger: The Tagging Process

The mechanics of applying tags in Photo Tagger is pretty basic. If all of the faces within a group are of the same person, you need only click the Tag all link to the left of the group, type in the person’s name, and hit Enter. (Clicking elsewhere on the screen will not apply the name data.) Initially, though, you’re not likely to get many 100% accurate groups. You’ll need to weed out the stray images. In the bottom-right of each face box, there’s a blue square with a white circle in it. Click this and you’ll be able to either type in a name for the person, which will start a new group with that name if it doesn’t exist already, or you can click “ungroup,” which will send the face to the Ungrouped group.

My Ungrouped section was pretty big—several dozen faces—and some of these I felt were clear and close enough to hits in other groups that they should have been included with them. But I’m a human; what do I know? It’s important to keep in mind that Photo Tagger operates at an instant disadvantage versus other face taggers. Often, I’m uploading 5- or 6-megapixel images. The worst of my cell phone photos are still (usually) 1.3 megapixels. When you upload images into Facebook albums, they’re downsampled to 604x453 at 72 dpi, which is about one-quarter of a megapixel. So while I have to ding Photo Tagger for not being as accurate as some other face taggers, the fact that it does as well as we’ve seen with such tiny source images is remarkable. Besides, even if Photo Tagger couldn’t come up with a single association and threw everything into Ungrouped, it would still be a better UI for tagging than Facebook’s de facto interface. There’s no check box for your Friends, but Photo Tagger does perform auto-fill of Friends in name entry fields. I do wish that it would learn repeated names that aren’t Friends and add those to the auto-fill list.

This Ungrouped area would be a lot more useful if it offered an opportunity to batch select and apply a tag to this selection...but it doesn’t. This is the app’s single biggest flaw. Instead, I found myself having to paste in the name of the person I was tagging repeatedly. You can use the Friends pull-down menu if your Ungrouped face is on your Friends list, but because of the slight delay caused by this being a Web app, I actually found it faster to Ctrl-V in names rather than use the pull-down.

In general, Photo Tagger correctly located face tags 30% to 50% of the time, so while it was better about making associations among hits, it’s overall hit rate was just as mediocre as the competition. (In the above image, you can see that Photo Tagger associated one woman with a tree.) Once more, this necessitates a trip into the Photos tab to do a frame-by-frame audit of every photo. I’d say that the average frame edit requires 10 to 15 seconds. Some of those are simply load times with no additional changes. Many require placing and resizing a tag box or two, then applying a name. The end result is a test completion time for my four subjects of roughly 80 minutes. The Web has its advantages, but it does take longer.