Interim Solutions for Picasa face tagging + Keywords to IMatch (detailed)

[lnh]

There was a previous very old thread which talked about this topic and more (https://www.photools.com/community/index.php?topic=1373.msg8251#msg8251), but the board software suggested starting a new one, so...

The appeal is clear; although Picasa is a horrid DAM, the one thing it excels at is face tagging and to a more limited extent an ability to recognize people. I know Mario has written in the past about about adding the ability to read standards compliant face data from XML and create IMatch face annotations from that information. This would be a welcome capability only if there was a good way of creating a compliant XML face data set. Picasa itself doesn't really do this, and playing with some of the face metadata options can have consequences.

The first concerns I noticed from the previous thread was about Picasa itself; does it phone home and violate a more rigid view of privacy than the typical Terms of Service from most big companies these days. Similar to an approach suggested in the previous thread about using VM Ware Player and turning off network access, I installed the latest Windows version of Picasa on Linux Mint using the Wine capability to run (some) Windows programs. Within Mint I can easily toggle the network stack to be on/off. No telling if some sneaky stuff is happening in the background via cached files and background tasks, but it really does appear that Picasa can be run without a network connection and logging into Google and the face tagging etc seems to work fine. Upon install, Picasa wants to suck up all your images, and by default looks many places, but that can be configured in the file menu ("Add folder to Picasa"). It's best to cleans your system of any misc images you don't want sucked in (I put two other drives attached unmounted/offline just so there was no chance of it sucking in everything). Google's trick is by the time you've figured out how to not have it suck in everything, it's already sucked it in. The other suggestion is to never log into your google account. Even though you have granular control in settings whether you want to upload stuff to G+, if you log-in it automatically populates the people database with every contact you may have (including the ones that are created from emailing someone). Once that happens, even if you logout, you cannot get rid of all those contacts from inside Picasa any longer. The fix is to delete the contacts XML file sitting in C:\Users\"your user name"\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2\contacts, and Picasa will create a clean one the next time you exit the program. The other concern about Picasa some on the internet have reported is that it doesn't always play nice with metadata and might strip or modify things like maker notes. For my test files I created an inventory of metadata using exiftoolgui, both before and after. At least for the file types I used, it appears to maintain all the original metadata.

From what I can tell, the only Picasa to XML face utility which has a shot at working is AvPicFaceXmpTagger. I've had good success using it with JPG files out of Picasa, however RAW files have been more frustrating. I've tried CR2, RAF, ORF, ARW and RW2. It appears to process and recognize the CR2 and RAF files which are from older Canon and Fuji cameras. The ORF, ARW and RW2 are all from more recent post 2010 cameras. If I try to individually add those files to the processing list, it doesn't recognize them (setting the filter to all file types). I've set the options to create XMP sidecar files for all these formats, but again the more recent cameras never have sidecars generated.

Does anyone have experience using this utility with more recent cameras? From what I can tell AvPicFaceXmpTagger seems like an abandoned piece of software which hasn't been updated in over 4 years. Their support forum hasn't had a post in nearly 4 years as well. I've also downloaded the most recent exiftool and set the program to use it instead of the built-in one.

I also kept the folders associated with Picasa and IMatch separate. After getting a folder face matched, I'd move it from within Picasa to a new location, copy it for AvPicFaceXmpTagger/IMatch processing and create a new work folder for Picasa. I keep the already face matched folder available within Picasa thinking the face matching might improve as it collects more data.

For the files which either had XML side car's created or XML records added to the original files in the case of JPG, IMatch played pretty nice with the data. Of course at this point IMatch doesn't do anything with the face tags directly, but Lightroom style hierarchical keywords can be configured in AvPicFaceXmpTagger, and those matched up perfectly with my existing database. There was a bit of erroneous data with a keyword called "ffffffffffffffff" created for some files, but those were easy to correct within IMatch (either a Picasa or AvPicFaceXmpTagger bug).

The bottom line is if you have enough files to churn through, it's seems worth the effort, but at this point the problem with some RAW formats is a significant problem. My advice to Mario is to not bother with the XML face data to annotation feature unless some supported solution for extracting face data from Picasa or another app is available. AvPicFaceXmpTagger would be fine if it got updated. If some future version of Lightroom did it, and that data could be put in sidecars, that would be fine as well.

[Frank]

HI,
I have used AvPicFaceXmp very long and at the end I came up with the way of not using it longer, because it does not write the information into the correct namespace recommended by the MWG.

Picasa does it very well with jpg pictures! I will not give picasa access to my raw data!!!

That has than a complete different datamodel within Imatch. I have jpg as the Master and all neccessary information are sored there. The RAW is in my way the buddy. So I do not have than any problem using it.

If you have started working with picasa before picasa was able to store the information than there is a way of doing it later by picasa.

Unfortunality I am very bussy and if I have a little time I will sent the way of writing those information into the picture

Frank