My digital camera is very real proof that Japanese engineers are a very crafty bunch. There is a shooting mode called "Smile Detector." Here's what happens: you click the shutter button, and it goes into what I like to call "Smile Capturing Mode." When the camera's face detector detects a face with a little box, it waits until the person is smiling and SNAP! it automatically takes a picture. The "Smile Counter" on the screen increases by one, giving you an exact count of how many smiles you've captured. The amazing thing is that you don't take the picture, it just waits until it seems a smile and captures the moment.
When people hear about this, a short smile/no-smile photo session undoubtedly ensues. A large number of my digital photos are of people with a big, exaggerated, excited, toothy grins on their faces, sometimes with thumbs up, sometimes with eyes closed as they strain to smile, and sometimes with an unenthusiastic look across the rest of their face as they wonder the eff I was talking about when I said my camera could tell they were smiling.
In the camera's settings, you can adjust the "Smile Detection Level" to low, medium or high. I just think of this as setting the "Judgmental Camera Mode" to "open-minded, relatively picky, and severely harsh critic." In all honesty, the Smile Detector is pretty much a gag. Sometimes you don't want people smiling, or you're getting them from the side. For that, you really can't rely on the smile detector.
I have been reorganizing my digital photos on my new computer, and have discovered whole treasure trove of these smile detector photos. To commemorate this discovery, I'll be making a photo album just for these moments of fabricated joy.
Please don't judge the people in the photos too harshly; that's the camera's job.
Showing posts with label photos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photos. Show all posts
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Friday, June 5, 2009
Facebook vs. Google's Picasa
I've found myself making the switch from posting pictures on Facebook to using Google's Picasa service. Why? A few reasons:
1) No limit to number of photos in an album.
2) You can download higher quality versions of the photos, instead of the single reduced-quality image Facebook provides.
3) Easier to share photos, even with people who don't have Google accounts (my mom even did our family's Christmas card online with Picasa this year...all by herself. THAT'S shocking).
4) Online slideshows.
5) The new people-tagging functionality. Check it out here: http://picasa.google.com/intl/en_us/features-nametags.html
This last one is the most impressive, and if you haven't used Picasa to post photos recently, you probably haven't experienced this. Here's what happens: You tell Picasa to analyze all of your albums. After it's done, it presents you with a filmstrip of all of the thumbnail-size faces that it recognized from those photos. It attempts (relatively successfully) to group shots of the same person together, so with one click you can tag the same person in a dozen photos. It learns who the people's names are and makes suggestions, and when it gets it wrong, you can do a quick search (just the first few letters of the person's name can find it in your address book).
I had about 1,300 faces and was able to take care of a few hundred relatively quickly, but finishing it off is a daunting task, especially as you have to start doing one at a time. Despite this, Picasa's ability to recognize faces was seriously impressive, and introduces a whole to approach to tagging people. You can also also do it in the album itself, and if you've already let Picasa analyze the album, it has usually found where the faces are and makes tagging in the picture environment super-easy as well.
Facebook "killer"? Who knows, I'm sure there's lots of talk about that somewhere else. But compared to the daunting task of Facebook tagging, this method rocks. And overall, Google's doing a REALLY nice job of streamlining online photo management. You can even tag locations on a little Google Map.
If you're the kind of person that posts photos on Facebook so EVERYONE can see them, then you lose out on the accessibility of clicking that little "See more photos of [insert stalkee here]." But if you're posting photos for a select group of people and don't necessarily need the whole world to see—which is how I'm feeling recently—then Picasa is probably the way to go.
Of course, I'm sure there are ways to get the best of both worlds (posting one photo from the album on Facebook with link to the Picasa version, a link in a Status Update, a link in your profile, etc etc etc.), I just haven't investigated........yet.
1) No limit to number of photos in an album.
2) You can download higher quality versions of the photos, instead of the single reduced-quality image Facebook provides.
3) Easier to share photos, even with people who don't have Google accounts (my mom even did our family's Christmas card online with Picasa this year...all by herself. THAT'S shocking).
4) Online slideshows.
5) The new people-tagging functionality. Check it out here: http://picasa.google.com/intl/en_us/features-nametags.html
This last one is the most impressive, and if you haven't used Picasa to post photos recently, you probably haven't experienced this. Here's what happens: You tell Picasa to analyze all of your albums. After it's done, it presents you with a filmstrip of all of the thumbnail-size faces that it recognized from those photos. It attempts (relatively successfully) to group shots of the same person together, so with one click you can tag the same person in a dozen photos. It learns who the people's names are and makes suggestions, and when it gets it wrong, you can do a quick search (just the first few letters of the person's name can find it in your address book).
I had about 1,300 faces and was able to take care of a few hundred relatively quickly, but finishing it off is a daunting task, especially as you have to start doing one at a time. Despite this, Picasa's ability to recognize faces was seriously impressive, and introduces a whole to approach to tagging people. You can also also do it in the album itself, and if you've already let Picasa analyze the album, it has usually found where the faces are and makes tagging in the picture environment super-easy as well.
Facebook "killer"? Who knows, I'm sure there's lots of talk about that somewhere else. But compared to the daunting task of Facebook tagging, this method rocks. And overall, Google's doing a REALLY nice job of streamlining online photo management. You can even tag locations on a little Google Map.
If you're the kind of person that posts photos on Facebook so EVERYONE can see them, then you lose out on the accessibility of clicking that little "See more photos of [insert stalkee here]." But if you're posting photos for a select group of people and don't necessarily need the whole world to see—which is how I'm feeling recently—then Picasa is probably the way to go.
Of course, I'm sure there are ways to get the best of both worlds (posting one photo from the album on Facebook with link to the Picasa version, a link in a Status Update, a link in your profile, etc etc etc.), I just haven't investigated........yet.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
