Been a tiring and fast week.  Am currently listening to some Pandora (Pocket Calculator - Kraftwerk), and finishing up another Drupal theme for a client.

This week began with the realization that I have too many photos to sort through by hand in explorer anymore.  Somewhere in the realm of 3000 stock photos that have been purchased in the last couple of years (yikes that's alot of money), about 30,000 personal photos taken over the last decade, and another ~1000 custom creations/art/home movies.  It was too much to look through by hand.  That's when I, obviously behind the times this time around, saw my first PC and Mac conversation about the new iLife 09 with iPhoto and Faces..

I first took the low road, thinking that maybe Vista had something that was underrated and just as good.  I disovered (again, behind the times) the Windows Live Gallery.  After a few Windows updates and the Live Gallery signup/installation, the program was quick to find and categorize everything for me just fine.. Nice use of smart folders (or mass tagging) for me to simply group 40 physical folders of purchased stock photography from Corbis, Dreamstime, and Veer.   I also noticed that it had face tagging, but not as shiny and awesome as what Apple promised.  So I set Live Gallery aside, at least content with the fact that I could find things more efficiently during workflow.

Excited for the possibilities, I grabbed a copy of iLife 09 straight away and got to work on the small amount of photos I happened to have sitting on the MBP.  Seemed tight, and honestly quite addicting to train the program to recognize me and my parents and friends and feline companions.. I EVEN got it to recognize beer brands by the bottle label!--- Note, it failed hard for any times I had sunglasses on or my beard was particularly long, or anyone had a hand to their own face.  Time to try it on my actual library (which lives on the PC).  I set up a referenced library and iPhoto relatively quickly addressed all my stuff (with 50mb TIFF files from my HDR projects taking considerably longer).  Then the Faces anaylsis kicked in.  Only 490 minutes left till I can train the pants off of this program!

.. 12 hours later, still only 290 minutes left ..

.. 5 hours later, still only 289 minutes left.  Are you effin kidding me?

At this point I've had 17 hours to contemplate the viability of iPhoto, I almost never use my Mac unless I'm sitting on the couch or on holiday out of town and need a computer.  Aside from the fun of training and having a computer recognize me, I couldn't see any reason that I'd ever wake up the lappy to go looking for photos.  And while in contemplation and reading on Google for other people suffering the 24 hours of 300 minutes I ran across the latest version of Picasa3, now owned by Google.

Downloaded their very sexy program and it blasted through my computers 10 drives, scouring for goodies.  Golden.  It has a feature that could mature in later versions which will show you only photos in your collection that have actual faces in them, but no means to identify them.  However, if you upload photos to your Picasa Web album you can tell the online interface to scan for faces.  It's holy-shit fast and unbelievably accurate.  It found all pictures of me without question- be those with sunglasses, without, bearded or not, making out with my girlfriend, partially occluded, far in the background, near and filling the entire frame.. it ALL worked! My gosh.  It won't recognize kitties tho ;)  It only failed once or twice when it suggested my father or mother for a pic of me.. but I guess that's actually pretty okay too haha.

I also just used Picasa to do some online purchasing of my engagement pictures.  I know that's not exclusive to them, but their presentation is better and made me want to do it more eagerly.  There is also video editing capabilities in Picasa but it fails to work for me, just sits there "preparing".. I assume it's because of my FFDSHOW codecs installed for my movie collection.. I don't mind too much, I already use Nero for extremely fast video editing/compression/whatever.

Where does this leave me? Well I'm now using Picasa3 to manage my non-art photos of family and life events and sharing to the Picasa Album online.  Art and good attempts at proper photography go to Flickr (via FlickrUploadr program, but NOT Windows Live Gallery Flickr interface which sucks).   I'll probably continue to use Windows Live Gallery for work stuff only, it seems the fastest at showing me the stock photos by tags I've given them (nevermind, Picasa album solved that too.).  iLife 09 is now unloaded from the mac and rolled back to my previous version.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I 'try' before I buy (by whatever means I need to take to that end).

Dear Apple, sorry- If it was really good, I would have bought it.

Dear Google, bring the face recognition off of your farm and into the next Picasa update!  Cheers for free sexy programs, but boo for the 1GB limit on the free web gallery storage.

Dear Microsoft, our relationship is still full of resent but you'll always be my friend never-the-less.