Age of Subject

[Quin]

I'm fishing in very deep waters here!  The thought I've had is for some way to show the age of a person in a data-driven category (?) so that when looking at an image the Categories Panel could show "John Doe aged 10 years".  This would mean the database having stored somewhere the Date of Birth of the person whose name is a Category.
Would anyone have any comments, thoughts or ideas on this? (Even "Forget it!")
TIA

[sinus]

Hm, without deep thinking:

interesting idea.
But this birthdate we should then compare with the actual date and then calculate the real age.

I do not very often use data-driven - cats, hence I do not know. I guess, it should be possible.

[Quin]

I'm thinking that the (stored) Date of Birth would be compared with the Creation Date of the image in order to produce the persons age at the time when the picture was taken.

[sinus]

Would be nice, a good idea.

[Mario]

There is an XMP tag named "modelAge" which is used in agency environments to record the age of the model at the date and time the image was taken.

This field is described as

Model Age [IPTC Extension]
Age of the human model(s) at the time this image was taken in a model released image. As the information in this field is primarily to aid in searches, there is no requirement regarding the order of the ages if there is more than one model in the image. Adding age information is optional, and we recommend that you do not guess at the age(s) of the models, but only enter that information if the age of the model is known. The user should be aware of any legal implications of providing ages for young models. Ages below 18 years should not be included.

Of course you an also use one or more IMatch Attributes to store the age of the person(s) shown in the image.
You can use Attributes to create data-driven categories using a normal variable.

Or you set aside one of the 'free' text XMP fields and store the age information there.

Or you setup an "age" keyword hierarchy under @Keywords, with child keywords for each age: "age|19" or "age|44". This way you have the information available in keywords to use it for multiple purposes. And you have an automatic categorization of your files too.

No real need to store the date birth. IMatch has no functions to perform date calculations or to dynamically build a category by looking at the photo taken, person in the image, lookup birth date of person, then calculate age and add to child category"... while this is of course doable, I wonder how many people will have a use for it. Simpler by just setting the age once when you edit the metadata of the file.

[sinus]

No real need to store the date birth. IMatch has no functions to perform date calculations or to dynamically build a category by looking at the photo taken, person in the image, lookup birth date of person, then calculate age and add to child category"... while this is of course doable, I wonder how many people will have a use for it. Simpler by just setting the age once when you edit the metadata of the file.

An interesting answer.
I guess, if it would be easy, a lot of people would do this, specialy for family-members. There is it sometimes nice to know, if someone is 24 years or 24.8 years old.
For family-members it would be even interesting to know something like this:

"Here Sam is 32.2 years*, now he is 49.7 years old".

* or in years and days or years, month and days or so.

Quin, if you find a solution, would be nice sharing here.

My brother is an "amateur-chronist", you would not believe, what kind of stuff he is interested in, what astonishings often me, when he writes down for example the name of a beer during a party. 

Here, I guess, he would know the age in years, monthes, days and hours ... and who knows, maybe also in secondes. 

[Mario]

There is always the feature request board...

[mastodon]

And how would you render the birth date to the person, if you would have more person with the same name? I have that problem with face annotations, there are lot of John Smith-s ex., but all of them looks up in one persons face annotation.

[sinus]

Using a second firstname. John Paul Smith.
Or use a number, like in many forums. John Smith 1
I believe, chroniclers does have a special number for each person. In this number we can even see, who is the father, mother, relatives and so on. I use such a system for family-pictures, but a real genealogist could explain this better and more correct, I think.

I mean, using an email-account with the same name would bring also a big mess (I think, this is even not possible).

[Mario]

The best possible solution for this would be to integrate it with an "Object" feature I have on my maybe-to-do list.
Managing birth or "build" dates is an integral part of this concept...
Maybe something we'll see later this year.

[Quin]

Thank you Mario for your very useful responses.  Here is my thinking so far:
To be able to 'compute' the age of a person in an image (This might have applications in other areas where pictures of 'objects' - animate or inanimate - for example racehorses, or plants and flowers, are taken at regular or occasional intervals, and it would be useful to know the time that has elapsed since a specific event (birth) occurred), there must be somewhere in the iMatch database where the 'birthdate' of a particular 'object' can be stored.  The only place I can think of is in Global Attribute Sets, but Mario appears to have other ideas up his sleeve!
Then, using a script, triggered when a Category is applied to (or removed from) an image (Is there a Database Event fired when these occur?), the script would check if the Category was in the category sub-tree 'People'.  If so, it would look to see if there was a Global Attribute (in a Global Attribute Set with Name and DoB fields) with that persons name in its 'Name' field, and, if so, get the Date of Birth from its 'DoB' field.  Then, getting the Creation Date from the image it would compute the age of the person and store it in either (i) a File Attribute Set for that image, or (ii) into a metadata field in that image, or both.  An image may have 0, 1 or more File Attributes in its File Attribute Set of course.  A problem with storing this information in a metadata field is that the number of people identified in the image is unknown, and the data to go into the metadata field may exceed its capacity.
I must have a coffee now to cool the brain!

[Quin]

I'm going to hang fire on this now, until I see all the great goodies that Mario has lined up in IM 2017 !!  I anticipate that either (i) Mario has/will build this functionality directly into the new product, or (ii) the new product will make the scripting of this functionality a (relative) doddle!
Whatever, the cost benefit of IMatch is absolutely incredible.  For the outlay of a small amount of money every once in a while I get to use a phenomenal piece of software that does the tasks that I want it to do, leaving me feeling very pleased with myself.

[Mario]

The universal "object" concept is still in the design brain-storm phase. Basically I'm thinking about how such a concept would be useful, how to integrate it etc.
Faces/Persons are only one part of the concept.

I want to think this through.
This is like the categories concept, which sill works great after 10 years.
Like all features which manage data entered by the user in some form the new concept must be reliable and working long-term.