Photology Makes Sorting Through Photos A Snap

photology-logo.pngIf you are going to insist on still making client-only software, at least put up a Flash demo on the Web. That is what startup Enoetic just did, with this
slick demo of its Photology software for organizing and searching through your digital photos. The downloadable software, which costs $29, only works on Windows, but the demo is set up to show how the software works using about 9,000 photos from Flickr. You can auto-magically sort through photos, searching by color, date, time of day, photo orientation, photo quality, location (inside or outside), or even for specific common motifs (such as faces, sky, snow, water, plants). I don’t know if the demo is canned, but if it is not, the technology is quite impressive. I played around with it and only got a few false positives. The screen shot below shows a search for red photos in focus.

I want this for my Mac. Or at least for my Flickr photos. Too bad this is just a demo, and you cannot apply it to your own Flickr account. But what is notable about this is that there is no tagging involved. Photology in effect auto-tags your photos for you. If the company could combine that with the human-generated tagging on Flickr that would be a killer combo.

When it comes to indexing your entire digital photo collection, I agree that you still need a client-based piece of software. Most people don’t have the time to upload all their photos online. But what Photology needs is a Web component. If it can already indexed your entire photo collection, why not create low-res Flash versions that can be uploaded in bulk to Flickr or some other Web repository where they can be further enhanced, tagged, and shared? I guess you can’t have everything.