Photology Makes Sorting Through Photos A Snap
Erick Schonfeld
18 comments »
If 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.
Don’t think I will try this one!
It wouldn’t need to convert the photos to Flash, simply use the Flickr API to upload the photos in their original format (in the same way that Flickr’s own piece of client software, the Flickr Uploader, works).
Profiling Windows client companies… another slow news day?..
>photology is your solution!
Socgraphy is your solution - for the many social graphs by you and from your friends
[right, just kidding, happy holidays!]
It seems that something like this would be acheived easily by flickr if they were to add more attributes options to your photographs.
I can already organize my photos by outside versus inside, BW versus color, etc.
Hell, flickr already has a really great “Mapping” option for your photos which can help keep track of locations.
This seems like a bust to me, especially for $29.00
I can already accomplish a lot of this sort of organizing using my own specific tags that I have created - as long as you are consistent on a site like flickr you can search through all of your own photos based on certain tags and get similar results.
(I use Picasa as my gallery software, then edit in Photoshop, and upload only a few of my photos from each session to flickr)
I’ll try…
Gary - I appears that you don’t need to tag anything though, to sort by “red” or “inside”, the application figures that out for you.
That can save a lot time, in which case, 30 bucks is well worth it.
If you’re looking for a desktop tool to find, discover and sort through photos check out PicMe. It uses 3D stacks to allow users to quickly find and discover photos on their PC, Flickr or Facebook. (Unfortunately there isn’t a MAC version yet either) but it’s worth a look if you think photology is interesting.
http://picme.raizlabs.com
Nice App, nothing like it for linux!
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Nothing beats tags for sorting photos, especially in a group environment. Thousand words do speak louder than one picture in that case.
First, it’s not a flash demo, it’s Javascript. Secondly, it’s definitely canned. Look at the site’s source. I can forgive that though since they’re developing desktop software, and creating a pseudo demo is a great promotional tool. It will be interesting to see it really working though. I’m looking forward to that review. Hopefully Adobe will absorb these guys and implement the features into Lightroom.
If it’s a canned demo, it’s not a good one. Try to search for “sunsets”!
There have been several demos like that over the last year or so http://www.inperc.com/wiki/ind.....ch_engines. Very little success…
Combine this with a colourlovers palette and you’ll have a hell of a tool if it ever works.
I think Enoetic need to come up with a way to get Photology and Picasa to work with each other as a plugin search or something. I love Google’s Picasa and use it all the time. It is loaded with tons of cool features and sorting and finding stuff is really easy and practically automatic when you load it up for the first time. Photology does have it’s unique photo search algorithms which are pretty cool for finding stuff fast as shown in the demo.
Enoetic could sell their search algorithms technology to Google so they could add it to their Picasa product. This would really put the icing on the cake for Picasa. Google might be in the works of already doing it themselves for the next version of Picasa. Who knows?
Another alternative is that Enoetic should give their Photology software away, keep perfecting it and adding lots of features and then possibly sell it to Yahoo. This would make it way more popular (if its as good as they say it is). Everyone will be happy and using their software. Enoetic will be happy when they get the check from Yahoo! Yahoo will be happy because now they have a product that is directly competing with Picassa. Flickr.com and this future version of Photology working together would give yahoo and even stronger foothold on the web against Google in the arena of images.
That’s my opinion.
I don’t think it will be reliable to be useful (even their canned demo is not bullet proof). The whole thing is based on analysis of EXIF and color / pattern recognition and that can’t ever get close to human tagging.
Take the inside / outside category they have, that’s nothing more than a “Flash fired” EXIF field. Any photographer who’s slightly beyond a begiiner will name at least several examples when a flash is used outdoors and or when it’s not used indoors. The only reliable categories are those based on date/time. Everything is guessing at best. For instance, sky and grass are guessed by patches of blue and green. A person in the green sweater against the blue wall could also be labeled as sky and grass.
Even though it’s a cool experiment, no real world use is even remotely reliable.
Full disclosure: I am one of the guys behind Photology. I need to clear up a few misperceptions in the comments.
The demo is definitely NOT “canned” (which is why we put the statement at the bottom of the demo page). The classifications you see are the result of a completely automated analysis, which is the identical analysis that the desktop Photology application does. For the web demo, the results of the analysis were transferred to a MySql database, which is used on our web server to retrieve the results depending on the filters you select. The photos were also selected completely randomly from Flickr - no attempt was made to “enhance” any results by manually paring down the photo set.
In fact, downloading the photos took much longer than analyzing. The analysis of the approximately 9000 photos took about 30 minutes on my Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop. If you want to reproduce the results, I would be glad to post the Flickr URL’s for all of the photos, you could download them and index them in Photology, and you would get the IDENTICAL results.
Regarding the performance of the filters, our goal is not to make them 100% accurate. Not only is that unattainable, it is not necessary for our product, where the goal is to be able to quickly search through thousands of probably untagged photos to find the one you’re looking for. We’re trying to help out the large number of users who have no organization scheme and have not gone to the trouble to tag all their photos.
We’ve found that with Photology you can get to virtually any photo you want to find in a very limited number of clicks, but you have to be willing to experiment a little. Ask yourself how many times the document/website you’re searching for on Google shows up on the first page with your first search keywords.
If you want more information, I would strongly encourage you to view some of the videos on our website ( http://www.getphotology.com/learnMore.html ) or read our blog ( http://www.enoetic.com/blog/ ). There’s lots of detailed information there on how it works, how to use it, and what you can expect. There’s also some information about how it classifies things, and what kind of accuracy you can expect to get with automated classification.
Hope this clears things up.
One more thing I forgot to mention regarding Ron’s comments:
Ron did get it right that the inside/outside filter uses flash fired and the sky filter uses blue. This would be a simple approach that would give somewhat better results than “guessing”. (But you would be surprised how well one feature CAN work).
But Ron is not correct that only one feature is used per filter. The current Inside/Outside classifier uses 18 features and the Sky classifier uses 12 features. Sorry, but for competitive purposes, I can’t tell you what they are - oops, I already gave away 2! And the way those features are “combined” to determine a classification is actually a quite complex process.
Don’t want to harp on this, but I’m sure you understand that for a new product, image is everything (no pun intended). I hope I started to convince you that there’s really something other than trickery behind that “slick demo”. If all we had for our hard work was just a canned demo, we’d deserve to take the downward plunge taken by the many companies who choose that path.