Photology - A New Way to Find Photos
Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at 10:54AM photology makes finding photos easy, fast & fun
Steve from Photology wrote me a quick email, which I’m quoting here, as it pretty much gives you the information needed here -
We’ve just released a software application that we think Scrapabilityreaders will love. It’s called Photology, and it helps people organizeand search their digital photos in a totally new way. With digitalcameras, we’ve found that people are drowning in a mess of unorganizedphotos. Photology automatically organizes their photos for them basedon what’s in the picture; things like “faces”, “sky”, colors and date. Then Photology lets them search their photos using these features. Oneof our scrapbooking users has already chimed in on how useful just our”Search by color” feature alone is in helping her find good photos forher pages.
So, instead of having to tag all your photographs in a photo organiser - although there are many good ones out there - you can have the Photology application filter and find these, by colour, faces, sky, location, time of day ie find sunsets) etc.
I can certainly see the helpfulness in this, so took a very quick look using the free download and trial over the next few days. Currently, the application itself is on special for $29 USD until December 31st.
Quick Look at Photology
Install
Firstly, Photology uses Microsoft’s .NET framework 3. Quite a few applications out there do use .NET, so you may already have this installed onto your PC (similar to things like Java for other applications to run with). Being an ex-I.T. person, I certainly had it installed, but apparently not the latest framework. So the install of Photology took a little longer, as it helpfully downloaded and installed this for me also - sometimes applications just refer you to go get the latest upgrade to something like this. Providing the download needed directly from the installation gets the Photology makers big points from me, despite the relative long time in doing this (17 minutes it calculated!).
This slow install would not happen again, if you do already have .NET 3 installed with other applications. During the install, some adverts show you some of the features of the product also.
At the end of install, Photology nominates some standard folders you may want it to browse - I chose My Pictures and the desktop only. Install did not give me any other options like not having an icon created on the desktop, but that didn’t perturb me.
What I Had to Work With
I’m actually quite a good digital media organiser - by ambition anyway. I have a very strong file / folder structure for my digital photographs, and backup those often. My folders are catergorised and dated as appropriate, so I can normally find the photograph I want.
I also use photo organisers for organising my huge collection of digital elements - but that is such a huge ambition, that I readily admit that I haven’t tagged for a good long time. Which is the reason why I don’t use this to tag my digital photographs also.
Initial Use - Search
On opening, the initial reaction is that Photology doesn’t look like many windows applications - there is no file menu or similar. Icons on the left are your function filters. The initial startup obviously has the application browsing through your photo files, as does any photo organiser. This is interesting in itself, as images popped up as thumbnails which I had forgotten about. Although the main window can be minimised to the taskbar, a smaller toolbar browse function hangs out of your right hand side, and this sits ontop of any other programme you may be working with, allowing you a view of these thumbnails as the Photology program browses and finds these.
As the program was still going through it’s browse, I began to explore the search filters. Some of these didn’t work for me - particularly for locations which might be snow or water - these appear to be based on snow = grey colours and water = a light blue, so that’s the photos which were found. The colour search is obviously very defined - and matched many photographs for an apple green colour which I had forgotten about. This would be helpful for a scrapbooker doing a colour-themed layout.
The Features filter is interesting - I chose the no-focus filter from here, and it came up 95 photos immediately (without having finished browsing through all my folders.) I would like to suggest that this is a specific style of mine regarding photography, but in reality many digital photographers may probably be confirmed as keeping quite a few rubbish photos out of their hundreds taken, just out of bad housekeeping.
You can add a filter to a filter, so to prove this I started off with those of a high exposure level, then filtered down to those including a certain pink. You can also search for text strings, and dates - if you have changed the names of your photographic files. I normally only title the folders I organise into, and leave the jpgs from the camera at their normal numerical name until using them.
I then struck resource problems on my PC, with the Photology browse getting stuck on a photograph image it found in a folder which I know is huge in size. This is a portrait shot sent to me on a CD by a supposedly professional photography studio several years ago. It is huge because they didn’t at the time understand DPIs, and had originally sent me the images in 72dpi, and at a thumbnail size. To make amends they sent one next time which is around 100 inches wide, and several hundred megabytes in filesize. And with other resource-hogging applications open like my email application which was bringing in emails, and Paint Shop Pro which has difficulty with holding onto RAM, the Photology thumbnail browse brought my system to a grinding halt for a while. I corrected this by closing down two other applications and therefore giving up the RAM required. Photology is now continuing on with it’s browse. I would therefore suggest that this was an anomoly created with the size of the file, and some other known resource hoggers processing at exactly the same time, and something which most users will never encounter.
I’ve not got the time to work out how some of the filters do work. I did a date search for instance, which searched simply for photographs earmarked for 2002. I knew that technically I didn’t have any on this PC, as it was purchased later than that. But there would be a few copied over photographs from that year, as it was the year of our daughter’s birth and I kept hold of some of those baby photos. However, the search came up with 316 photographs, mostly of ones which I know belong in years from 2005 onwards. Whether the search is using exif data - which I don’t use - and is somehow reading 200+2 from elsewhere in this data is beyond me.
Initial Use - Other Features
Like many other browse systems, photographs can be rotated, or previewed in real size. They can also be grouped, and from the preview screen, a caption added. From this preview screen you can also print the photo, set as wallpaper, or adjust / edit (red eye, crop and some simple colour managment features). You can also chose the Share button, and choose to share on the web, into a file, or through your Flikr web album.
I pressed the web option on this file, then wasn’t quite sure what I was doing, as Photology started uploading to - somewhere. As this was my daughter’s image, and I don’t like sharing direct pictures of a little girl to all and sundry, I was a little scared about this option. At the end of the upload I was given a weblink to copy. I had to paste it into here to see where it lead me. It appears that this web image, in a zip file, is held on the Photology server now, and without contacting them, I have no way of getting it deleted. However, the zip file has an encrypted title, and on clicking the weblink, the zip downloads to your own PC, and you will then need to unzip to find the original photograph.
This sharing facility and free service from Photology is actually quite helpful. I added some photographs to a small group, then shared this via the Web share function. So, instead of gifting you with a photograph of my daughter accidentally - no matter how cute she may be in it - I have overwritten the weblink with another one, this time of a zebra and Sydney Opera House, which is some stock photography supplied on my HP PC at the time of purchase. It would be an easy manner to use this service to share photographs with your family members via zip files by putting this link into an email to them. However, I also obviously see the vulnerabilities here with providing another file sharing service which could be exploited for sharing digital designs as piracy. However, remember this is not a free service once the trial is over - the application itself is sold and users will therefore be registered and presumably locatable should they use such a function for piracy sharing.
Photology Summary
I am not going to suggest any recommendation here. Regarding many of the filters, they are extremely helpful, and certainly quick to find photos to match your criteria. For a scrapbooker, this may be even more helpful, especially if combining colour selections with some features / faces etc. This would allow you to find all those beach shots of your daughter where she is wearing that bright red swimming costume, for instance. But for me, some of the filters don’t work as I intended, so the application may need more thorough testing from my side to work out it’s features.
I would suggest that if you do find this interesting, give the free download a shot and have fun playing with the filters. As the very least, it brings up so many photographs and memories that you will have forgotten existed - and all on your computer, too.
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Reader Comments (2)
Here's a comment for you - they aren't broken!
I'm one of the guys behind Photology, and I thought I'd chime in with a few answers for the issues you mentioned in your post.
Text search in Photology looks not only at the filename, but also at any captions you've entered (in Photology), AND at the folder name in which the photos reside. So, text search works even if you haven't renamed your photos.
While it is doing the initial analysis of your photos, Photology does take up a fair amount of resources, and performance can suffer. But once the initial analysis is complete, there should be no problems with performance at all.
As far as the date issues you encountered, we do use EXIF data as well as system file info. All .jpgs exported from a digital camera do include the date and time the photo was taken in the EXIF. If you've stripped that data from the jpg, then the best we can do is to look at the file created date set by Windows. And Windows does kooky things with file dates, which may be one of the causes for the strange behavior you saw. Another potential issue could be if the clock on your digital camera was set incorrectly. As we rely in the EXIF date, if your camera thinks it's two years earlier than it really is, then things won't show up properly. There are several EXIF editing tools available to correct such faulty data, and we do plan to eventually add in the capability to do time/date adjustments from within Photology.
We provide the web share as a service to our customers, and do monitor its use. If we find that people are abusing it (e.g., piracy, spam) we have mechanisms in place to stop the offenders.
Your concerns regarding privacy with web sharing from Photology aren't a problem. As you noticed from the file name, we do encrypt your data when you share it. We don't want other people snooping through our photos either, so the photos you share with Photology have significant protection.
As far as filters not "working," think about it in terms of telling a story. Sometimes poeople don't get it and you have to rephrase in order for them to understand. That sort of the thing can happen with Photology, but you can always find a photo by rephrasing your search by using different filters. Think of the combination of filters as a story that you tell Photology.
Thank you for taking the time to write about Photology.
Tim.