MediaShow 5: UI and Criticisms
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
9. MediaShow 5: UI and Criticisms
Unfortunately, nobody ever creates a perfect first-generation product, and CyberLink’s first stab at face tagging still needs some refinement. I shared early results with my contact at CyberLink—a guy I trust implicitly as an honest straight-shooter—and he found it strange that my top groups contained so few faces. The biggest number of associations I had was four. My contact swears that his own testing as well as that done by NVIDIA and many others shows the norm to be much higher. My images range from ratty 1.3-megapixel shots taken with a BlackBerry to high-def portrait scans, showing a wide range of subject, lighting, composition, and so on. In short, I think it’s a pretty normal collection for a consumer. So if my results are abnormal, I can’t tell you why, but I can tell you that CyberLink feels you’ll see more accurate matching than I did.
I proceeded to carry on with tagging my four test subjects. When you start with MediaShow tagging, each group is topped with three buttons: Select (for adding a name tag to the entire group), Skip (which defers the tagging of those faces for later), and Remove (which erases the tag boxes created for those faces during analysis). As you start adding names, MediaShow will add up to three buttons after Select showing recently used names. If the program feels fairly sure about a match, it will outline the name button in blue. The weird thing is that no matter how wide you make the UI, MediaShow will only offer up to three name buttons. If you need a name that isn’t on a button, you can find it on the pull-down menu under Select. The UI will display as many association groups as you can fit into the vertical length of the window, but you can’t see more than three name buttons. I was also unable to drag the application window wider than a single screen, which stinks because I could be more productive when using side-by-side monitors.
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- Next page MediaShow 5: Criticisms, Cont'd
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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.