Picasa -- Cooler than I Am

[zourtney]

So, after Brad's semi-recommendation a few weeks ago, I decided to give Picasa another try. I'll admit it, I'm impressed. The addition of the facial recognition is pretty much all I need to forfeit all development efforts and bow down to the Mighty Google Machine.

It's going to take a long, long time just to tag the faces in the photos. It'll take even longer to tag the other remaining items in my nearly 100,000 photos. But I have to give credit where credit it due. I can't compete with this. So I'll use it.

[Nick]

Sad but true. But you shouldn't feel bad. They have a budget and teams of programmers. Rather then just you and spare time.

Can it locate and tag other things in pictures? Like if I show it my car can it find and tag all pictures of it? I guess I should just check it out and see.

[zourtney]

I think it's pretty much just limited to facial recognition. And yeah, I think the program was a pretty decent glob of software when Google bought them up. And now it's better.

If you look here, there are indeed APIs. Maybe we could do something with that...though I'm not quite sure what, at the moment.

[Nick]

Your "printable" tag and resizing options shouldn't be toooo hard to add....

[Cody]

I am actually rather annoyed with Picasa...it pretty much sucks in my opinion now. Despite the fact that I installed it on a completely different hard drive, it is sucking up ALL the memory on my C drive. To the point where I actually got a message on my system tray saying I was almost out of room. It took the 2-4 gigs that I had on there and reduced it to about 100 megs. Yeah, really not happy.

[Nick]

How is it taking up all the disk space? It should just be indexing things not moving them. Strange. I'll look at mine and see what its doing. (I just installed it though)

[Brad]

Disk space?? What do you have Picasa doing? It doesn't make copies of all your photos or anything, so why would you be losing hard drive space?

[Cody]

It creates a database in C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Local Settings\Application Data\Google so that it can do all its fancy fancyness apparently. It only takes up a small percentage of the size of all your images but when you have 140 thousand images and only 5 gigs free on your C: drive it eats it up really fast. Luckily I was able to find a program called Winbolic Link that creates a 'junction' linking the original database location to my 1 TB hard drive. Now I have plenty of room for its database and it all still works great. Though...I do agree with the masses of people that are yelling at Picasa to give you an option as to where to store its database vs. forcing you to put it in your profile on your C: drive...

[zourtney]

Um, I'm not sure what you did. Mine is keeping the files in place. I had to screw with the settings fo a few minutes, but it is possible.

[Cody]

It does absolutely nothing to the pictures, it just creates a file of information for it to read about all the tags and faces and whatnot. A very very massive information file when you have as many pictures as we do.

[zourtney]

Yeah, well, it's got to store the database file somewhere. And if it stores thumbnails in it (which seems like the proper thing to do, from my programming perspective), it will be huge.

I think I have a new addiction. Taggin' faces an' swamp divin'!

[Nick]

You do those activities together? Or are they two separate addictions?

[zourtney]

This fun-yet-boring project has slowed. Mostly because I can't identify a bunch of family members by name without assistance. And no one who could help has the boring-task-stamina that I do.

Speaking of which, we should do unboring stuff.

[Brad]

I'm down to about 2,000 faces left to identify. There were a huge amount of people on there that I didn't know. All those pictures in Disneyland? They all had like 20 extra faces of random people I'll never see again.

[zourtney]

Well, yeah, there is that. Also, that "bang your head here" sign there often comes up as a "face." But, no, like Eve's extended family I should remember...I got stuck there. Even she doesn't know their names, but somone must.