CyberLink MediaShow 5
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
7. CyberLink MediaShow 5
CyberLink has done an impressive job at making itself the dominant name in GPU computing-accelerated consumer software. If you have a recent-model NVIDIA (CUDA) or AMD (Stream) graphics card, then CyberLink has video applications able to use your GPU’s massive parallel processing capabilities to accelerate or improve what you can do. The new MediaShow 5 ($49.95) is CyberLink’s “quick fix and edit” app for home videos and photos and it now leverages CUDA acceleration for several functions, one of which is face tagging. I’m sorry to be a tease, but I’ll be looking at this aspect of MediaShow in an upcoming article over on Tom’s Hardware. For now I just wanted to let you know that the CUDA boost is there in case you’re an NVIDIA user. It can come in handy, especially if you have thousands of images in need of tagging.
When you first start MediaShow 5, it presents you with a scrolling wall of thumbnail images pulled from your media collection fronted by four floating bubbles. The bubble on the left is for photo work. Click this, get into the Home tab’s Library, and, if necessary, click Add Folder to point MediaShow at your photo album’s location, then click the Select Folder button. If you look in the bottom-left corner of Media Show, you’ll see a little spinning icon and the word Scanning. Wait until this goes away before you proceed; otherwise, you’ll be working with only part of your collection.
In the Library bar along the left side of the UI, you’ll see your photo folder appear under Folders. Click this and thumbnails for all of your images pop up in the main viewing area. Now click the Tag Faces button and you’ll see a pop-up asking how you want to proceed tagging. Presumably, you want to tag all photos at this early stage, which is what I did.
- MediaShow 4
- Previous page iPhoto Analysis
- Next page MediaShow 5: Warning--Wide Load
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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.