April 19, 2008
I was a guinea pig for TagCow. We figured if this was going to do what it says it’d do, that save us a lot of time tagging our pictures.
In order to use TagCow, you have to register with their site, and upload the pictures to them. You can sign up for their flickr service, which I did, and they are supposed to tag your photo and then upload it to flickr. In order to tag people, you have to upload a picture of that person and assign their name to that picture. On April 1st, I uploaded a picture of me and Clint. Then I uploaded one picture. Several days later, the picture still wasn’t tagged.
One day after I signed up and uploaded my one test picture, it was confirmed that it is actual humans tagging the pictures. I reported to Clint that my picture still wasn’t tagged. A week later, it still wasn’t tagged.
Guess what.. I forgot about it.
Until today, April 19th. After realizing what the mystery was (”Hey, TagCow finally tagged my picture!”), we realized that it is still not perfect. Not only did it take 19 days to tag one picture, they changed the spaces to underscores in the title. That makes the title stretch all the way across the screen, and I have to actually use the horizontal scroll-bar! Secondly, it tagged Clint in the picture, but Clint isn’t in that picture. Maybe the human thinks Justin looks like the picture of Clint I uploaded? Who knows.
Anyway, I will not be using TagCow in the future. It’s a neat idea, but in practice, they have a long way to go.
Music: Sabbat - Hosanna In Excelsis
May 12, 2008 at 6:15 pm
[...] tried to “cheat” and hire humans to do it and masked it behind a web app but even that doesn’t seem to work so [...]
May 12, 2008 at 6:38 pm
I’ve been trying Tag4You.com … They are going for an automatic facial recognition (after training it by manually selecting who they are, of course). They bumped me to the top of the beta testing list, so hopefully ina couple weeks I’ll start to see something promising coming out of that site. Right now it’s just a beta shell — but it does currently recognize faces, lets you pick people (from existing tags), and then makes a note around their face — good for group shots.
May 12, 2008 at 9:49 pm
I tried Tag4You, but I’m kind of ambivalent about it. Often, I won’t neccesarily look at every picture posted. And I’m sure most people don’t look at all of mine. A picture is more likely to get looked at if it has notes. However, if every picture with people has notes in it, then after a while, the “this picture has x notes” in it becomes meaningless, and actual meaningful notes become lost, and I think they might actually get viewed less. So I’ve decided not to use it(except maybe for an occasional group shot).
At least based on my personal viewing behavior.
I realize its still in beta, and I realize it needs a database of faces to do the recognition, I would find it much more useful of you could select an individual picture, vs doing it on a face by face basis.
Partial retraction of my above comment:
I guess you can use it to tag without adding a note(I forgot about that). This may be useful for alot of people, unfortunately it doesn’t help me much, since I do all my tagging before uploading.