Seacoast History Blog # 91
August 1, 2010
I did not see this train coming. It was in all innocence that I clicked the "face recognition" button in Picassa, the free picture management software from Google. The next thing I knew my computer was grinding away looking for photos of human beings on my hard-drive. It took 9.5 hours, but eventually Picassa located just over 35,000 faces. That was the easy part. Then it was my job to identify everyone in the pictures. I have been doing just that for three days now and I have about 8,000 faces left to go. My own face is drawn and weary. My eyes are itchy liquid pools. But I am close. I am very close to cataloging the people I know. (Continued below)
There are two kinds of people in my life – real ones and characters from history. Like everyone I take digital pictures at weddings, vacations, family holidays and outings. Picassa, so far, has located about 600 photos of my wife Maryellen. It has begun to recognize her using whatever software algorithm it employs to tell one human from another in a two-dimensional photo. I can now find all 600 pictures in a couple of seconds no matter where they are stored or when they were taken since 1997.
I can also find any picture in which she is with me, or her best friends, or any of her 10 brothers. Piscassa knows who all these people are because I told the software who is who. This is a cute utility, but I probably would never use it -- if not for my history research.
It’s the second group that makes Picassa worth the three days of my life I just sacrificed.Fundamentally I write about dead people for a living. And I keep voluminous picture files for my history books and articles and lectures, and for the history photos that I post on my Web site and in my weekly newspaper column. I know through practice where most of the images are located on my hard-drive and I go there every day to add new ones or search for old photos. Who knew I had over 700 images of john Paul Jones on file? Yikes, more than my wife.
But after three digital cameras and 15 years of scanning pictures and right-clicking images off the Internet, my digital picture files are not exactly organized. No one but me could find anything here. Now Picassa finds stuff for me. Currently I have recognized about 300 people, some are friends and relatives in-the-flesh. Others are characters from history.Here my two worlds converge.
The current version of PIcassa is better at finding faces than recognizing individuals. It places a little box over the each face and IDs the person. If there are 20 people in a photo, it wants to know who they all are. The program serves up clusters of faces that have similar characteristics and asks the user to make the final decision. The user either types in a name or moves the face to the "Unnamed" pile. Occasionally Picassa recognizes me or my wife, but more often it thinks we are John Paul Jones. When Picassa misses a person altogether, the user can easily define the area around the face, identify the person, and add him or her to the "People" database. I have one photo of my wife with her 10 brothers and each is now tagged with his name.
Tagging the unnamed faces is a time-consuming task, but highly addictive. It's like playing a game of Human Tetris. The shapes just keep appearing and as fast as you click them away, more arrive. But because they are faces that I put into my own hard-drive, I am motivated to organize them. No, I am driven to organize them, and have gone without sleep or food in the process. It hurts, but I love it. As I make sense of all these people -- I am making sense of my own life.
Once I knock off the other 8,000 unnamed faces I can play with the features. You can easily add descriptions, fill in captions, include metatags or pin the location of the photo to Google maps -- and all of this info is searchable. Picassa is really designed for family photo albums, not history research. One button turns all your pictures of Aunt Emma into a collage. Another creates a memorial slide show for Emma's funeral, complete with sad music. I ran the program for myself, and it was like attending my own funeral. I cried my heart out. What a guy! If only we'd been nicer to him.Another couple of clicks and that movie goes directly onto YouTube. Pretty scary.
This is brilliant stuff, and just one more way Google is sucking our lives into its massive brain. I, for one, am happy to be assimilated. Picassa links to Gmail, so the minute I name a friend, it knows that person’s email address and can pull up every letter we've ever exchanged. The program also makes it super-easy to send any photo in my database to anyone via email. Click on my wife’s photo file and Picassa shows a thumbnail of everyone else who appears in photos with her. If you have photos of people you can’t stand, just drop them into the Unnamed category and condemn them to Limbo.
Then there is the freaky stuff. Picassa is looking for human faces – on signs, on cereal boxes, on TV sets. It doesn’t know one from another. So imagine my surprise to learn that, according to Google, there are three people in the photo below. Do you see them? Picassa recognized and labeled the little bust of George Washington on the right side by my shoulder and the one of John Paul Jones in the lower left. My human eyes did not even see my old buddies were in the room.
Copyright © 2010 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.
