What is the overall image management problem you are trying to solve?
A large collection of family photographs from two different families and multiple generations. At a recent wedding celebration, I was able to do searches to find photos of the bride, groom, bride and groom, and various family members. Much of the metadata was added at the time of scan (mainly things like year or location) but it was slow and tedious to mark individual photos.
How did you find out about Tag That Photo?
Googling for software to do facial recognition and most importantly add the tags to the Exif data for the images. I had made a first pass with Picasa years ago but that didn’t update the photo metadata and you therefor had to use their search.
How does Tag That Photo help in solving your specific problem?
It makes it very easy to tag all of the people photos and when it comes across photos that it’s not sure about (nor am I) it’s easy to ask my wife to look at them to see if she knows. I often end up tagging photos with things like Unknown Person A if they are the focus in photos and I don’t know who they are.
Is Tag That Photo part of a multi-tool pipeline to take a set of images from start to finish in your flow?
Yes – I typically will use it against the ever increasing photos from our family iPhones, but also use when scanning slides or photos. Typically photos are done on a flat bed scanner at reasonably high resolution and done in batches, the Exif data for a batch is updated and then the photos are moved to a NAS share where they are processed by TTP. In order to share the photos with extended family, there is a multistage process involving Apple shared photo albums and Flickr since Apple strips out most of the useful metadata.
How many images in total are you dealing with?
It’s about 25,000 scans/photos but a number of them are the backs of photos which have notes written on them.
If you didn’t have Tag That Photo would you be able to still solve your problem?
Yes, but with a much smaller set of photos and without tagging any of the people who were peripheral to an event – wedding/party attendees, friends, … I had been selecting out a subset of photos before spending the time to tag them.