Photography 101

[BigV]

2,598

[classicman]

ok, gotcha. That sounds pretty cool.

[BigV]

1,762

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1,195

I am going to finish this batch today.

[BigV]

704

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295

[BigV]

done.

goodnight.

[jimhelm]

I don't want to be a wet blanket, but I want to caution you about one thing:

Please be very sure that each and every one of the parents that you present with movies made out of hundreds of pictures centered on their kids understands very clearly that you are not stalking their little angel, or you will end up on a list and have to deal with a crap load of......crap.

[classicman]

^^^ wut he said ^^^

The world is a fucked up place and you gotta cover yer ass.

disclaimer:
Unless you are stalking their kids.
In which case go ahead and send the movies to everyone and ....
<jus kiddin>

[BigV]

good point jim.

you may be assured that I know each family personally, and have been friends with them for years. That's how I've managed to accumulate the pictures in the first place. That's no magic shield against crap of course, but anyone that's not digging the program isn't there. And indeed, I've had to sign photograph releases at some of the established summer camps. Regardless. I'm not stalking anybody's kid. Anybody's kid I have a picture of, that parent brought the kid to the bus and sent them off to camp with me and the other adults.

I don't think I've made clear how I came to have these pictures, but you can be sure, every one of them was taken with the implied consent of the parents.

[BigV]

I've scanned through the faces again and the pictures with identified faces. What I found is that there are LOTS of pictures that have *some* faces identified and others equally visible, indeed, faces of people recognized in other photos, that aren't detected by Picasa.

So. I've rescanned the whole collection, and the first total after this second scan produced almost 50,000 unidentified faces. That number is down to 28,005 now.

A neat trick I learned by accident has to do with a couple of sliders in the program. One slider is used to zoom into the picture. When you grab the slider, you can drag it to the right for increased magnification. There's another slider up at the top that is used to filter by date the pictures shown. I've used this second one a lot to reduce the working set of pictures with faces I have to make decisions about. As I dragged the slider to the right, it filters out older pictures. The further to the right I drag it, the set of pictures displayed is smaller and newer. This is useful, but difficult to manage the slider one pixel at a time, because the time scale is not strictly linear. And at the oldest ranges, I might make a tiny physical change and have the time threshold change by a year. At the right hand side of the scale, the same physical distance on the slider might represent a much smaller time delta, perhaps only one month. Making tiny changes at the older ranges was tough.

Then, I accidentally moved the cursor over the slider *and* accidentally rolled the mousewheel as the cursor was over the slider range and the slider moved one increment with each wheel detente I turned through! This is awesome! I tried it up at the top on the time slider, and it worked the same. So, now I can make the most granular changes to the time scale. This lets me divide the pictures into sets that are more easily understood since I take them in batches. Seeing them all together makes it harder to identify the faces since I have to shift contexts for faces I don't immediately recognize. I'm happy I found this kind of control in the interface.

[jimhelm]

Oh, and I should have mentioned that this is a pretty cool idea... looks like a lot of work.

The genealogists of the future, in your family at least, may have an easier time of it because of this time you're spending.

[BigV]

Thank you jimhelm.

Down to 17,723 today.

[BigV]

10,253

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8,271

good night