You know the baseball season is winding down where there's no baseball on Friday night. A taste of the long, cold winter ahead.
I spent the sadly baseball-less evening checking out a new software program. (I know, I really need to get a life.) Recently, I read a review of the new version of Picasa (Google’s free photo organizing software). It’s supposedly the best, pay or free. There are many reasons, but the ones that caught my interest are that it’s really fast, and it has really good face recognizing capability. It highlights faces for you, and you type in the name of person. It “learns” to recognize the faces, and eventually will tag the photos with the correct names all by itself. Supposedly, it can even recognize babies and young children as they grow up.
That sounded a lot easier than putting in names as keywords on each photo individually, especially for baseball pics. So I decided to give it a shot.
It makes ludicrous mistakes at first. It mistook Brandon Phillips for Andy Phillips. And my sister for Wladimir Balentien. (My sister looks nothing like Wlad.) And my mom for Todd Frazier. But sure enough, after awhile it started to get it. Eventually, it gets pretty good at recognizing faces, even from different angles, with different expressions, etc.
I had been using ZoomBrowser, the photo organizing program that comes with Canon cameras. While it has some advantages (like displaying the EXIF data for each image prominently), I think I'll be using Picasa from now on. It's so much faster at loading the images than ZoomBrowser (or Windows Explorer, for that matter). And the face recognition thing is great for baseball photography. I'm far to lazy to actually label every game photo I take with the names of the players in them. Now, I don't have to.
Labels: baseball photography
