Microsoft Windows Live Photo Gallery
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: facial, recognition, tagging | Themes: Software
- 1. The Tagging Challenge
- 2. Apple iPhoto ‘09
- 3. Apple iPhoto ‘09: First iPhoto Steps
- 4. Apple iPhoto ‘09: Wrinkles in Faces
- 5. Apple iPhoto ‘09: Funny Faces
- 6. iPhoto Analysis
- 7. CyberLink MediaShow 5
- 8. MediaShow 5: Warning--Wide Load
- 9. MediaShow 5: UI and Criticisms
- 10. MediaShow 5: Criticisms, Cont'd
- 11. MediaShow 5: Analysis
- 12. Face.com Photo Tagger
- 13. Photo Tagger: Opening Accuracy
- 14. Photo Tagger: The Tagging Process
- 15. Photo Tagger: Working With Photo Finder
- 16. Photo Tagger Analysis
- 17. Google Picasa 3.5
- 18. The Picasa Name Game
- 19. Picasa’s No Dog
- 20. Picasa Analysis
- 21. Microsoft Windows Live Photo Gallery
- 22. WLPG: Name On!
- 23. WLPG: Naming, Bonus Round
- 24. WLPG: Analysis
- 25. More on this topic
21. Microsoft Windows Live Photo Gallery
Bravado, yes. Stupid, no. Microsoft knows that cloud computing is the future, not just for enterprises but for everybody. There isn’t a huge rush to take the consumer to the cloud, but you already see it happening on platforms such as Xbox Live and the various Windows Live apps. One of the downloadable Live apps is Photo Gallery, which is everything Paint should have been but isn’t, perhaps for antitrust reasons or “fostering the partner community” or...I dunno. Anyway, Windows Live Photo Gallery is Microsoft’s answer to Picasa, and it’s intriguing to look at the face tagging differences between them.
Once you’ve got Live Photo Gallery downloaded and installed, you may need to point it at your target photo folder for importing. Simply click File, Include a folder in the gallery..., and browse to your target folder. The folder gets added under the All photos and videos header in the top-left corner of the UI. Microsoft doesn’t offer a progress indicator of the usual sort. As you can see in the screen capture, some images come in much sooner than others, so I’m not so sure that Live Photo Gallery tags them in order. In any case, it took Live Photo Gallery just under 11 minutes to finish tagging my entire collection.
The good news is that Microsoft does a decent job of tagging faces and little else. I found very few exceptions, such as the tiny bit of collar that was interpreted as a face in the image shown here.
The bad news is that Live Photo Gallery is so conservative that my 11-minute scan yielded only 210 total tags. The program totally disregarded faces in rotated shots, disliked faces even slightly blocked with other objects (such as hands), and it seemed somewhat arbitrary in the faces it did pick. I had many photos in which only one of two people was tagged, and it was just as often as not the one I thought looked least clear. In this photo, you can see that Microsoft only tagged one face—not the one without sunglasses and not the one that’s best illuminated. Just as iPhoto did on this image, it picked the only face that wasn’t tilted. I don’t know if one company is supplying most of the recognition logic to these software vendors, but it’s starting to look suspicious.
- Previous page Picasa Analysis
- Next page WLPG: Name On!
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
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.
I am giving comment for testing.
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.
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.
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.