Filed under: Internet, Photo, Features, Windows, Imaging Tips
Exclusive - Photology, new photo cataloging software
by Dolores Parker Oct 29th 2007 at 9:00PM
Photology, for Windows, was designed to help you make sense of the image data on your computer. Using hi-tech algorithims and artificial intelligence, Photology categorizes all the photos in your computer and allows you to access them with a nice, intuitive user interface. Instead of viewing by roll or file, you can access photos with various filters like time of day, color, content (faces, beach scene, plants) inside or outside, and features (orientation such as vertical or horizontal, focus or unfocused, color or black and white).
Priced at $39, with free updates for one year, Photology is affordable, but why would you pay $39 when there are so many alternative free cataloging/image editing apps out there? Photology believes its market advantage is the "automatic tagging," which frees users from the limitations of folders and file names, while also avoiding "tag explosion" that many users experience.
So for instance, if you wanted to find the photo of your daughter in a green shirt for ascrapbook project you're working on, you could search by the color green. See screenshot below:
Photology will then filter all your photos for the particular shade of green you're looking for. If you want to search for a photo but can only remember the time of day it was taken, you can search by morning, noon, afternoon, and night. Of course, as your math teacher would say, the data output is only as good as the input, and if your camera clock settings are whacked (which is what Photology searches by), well, you can figure the rest out. This might not be the best filter for you to use.
The date filter is also extremely useful if you want to view by a particular month, however, your math teacher's admonition still applies. See above for detail.
Location
Photology allows you to filter by location, either inside or outside. The inside filter worked really well and captured all the photos that were taken inside. The outside filter tended to also capture a few photos that were taken inside. We asked Steven Kim how that could happen and the long and short of it is, if your inside photos are well-lit and taken without a flash, it can sometimes lead the filter astray.
Features
Another way to search is using the feature filter. Here you can search for photos by exposure, focus, monotone, horizontal, vertical, and black/white. This is a good filter to use to find all the the photos that need tweaking and a). correct them or b). delete.
Content
The content filter allows you to search by water, faces, flowers, plants, beach, snow, sky and sunset. We searched by water and pulled up a few non water items, but the good news is, all the water photos did get picked up. Photology seemed to pick up a particular shade of blue for water items, including a car's license plate. (You gotta hand it to them, it's super thorough).
Text
You can also search by text, that is, if you have already tagged your photos. If not, this won't be particularly useful, however, in Photology, they make it easy for you to tag your photos if you're so inclined. The search also works on file names. So if you've already renamed your photos based on content ("Dobie birthday.jpg"), you can use text search for "dobie" or "birthday".
Tools
Photology comes with some basic photo imaging tools such as red eye eliminator, color correction, crop and rotate. They work great and are useful for quick touch-ups. Photology is non-destructive, so any edits to photos are tracked, but not stored as a separate "adjusted version" of the photo. The program just keeps track of "this photo needs these adjustments added to it," and leaves the original photo alone.
Groups
You can select photos to put in a separate group with whatever you name you choose. Groups are better than folders because a photo can be in as many groups as you want without having multiple copies of the photo scattered all over your hard drive.
Sharing
What's the point of searching and finding all your photos if you can't share? Photology has an easy built-in share program that allows you to send the photo to an obfuscated webshare address (that remains live for 7 days) which you can then copy and paste into an email. You can also save photos to the desktop or upload to Flickr. Photology expects to add more sites to the interface based on feedback it receives from end users.
Print
Photology has a print feature which allows you to print photos either 1, 2, or 4-up to a page.
Ease of use
The program is stunningly simple to use and the fliters do all the work for you. Rather than imposing a rigid organization scheme for you to follow, (when it's clear that dog wont hunt) you can rely on the various search filters to get you what you're looking for. In addition, to help get you acclimated, Photology provides some nice video tutorials. We'd like to see Photology incorporate the ability to see image size data in its next release as well as the ability to print custom sizes.
In the end, it all comes down to the question of price and need. Photology is an innovative app to help you pinpoint your vast photo collection. If you're drowning in thousands of image files, Photology is your new photo librarian and $39 doesn't seem like much to pay for pulling needles out of your image haystack.
Specs
Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista
The indexing software is based on Lucene.NET, a high performance indexer that maximizes the processing power of new multi-core machines. Photology is also useful on older PCs. To index a single image, it takes about 1 second on a 2 GHz Pentium. Indexing 6000 images on Photology's quad core test rig, took about 30 minutes.
Now, that you've finished reading the post, here's how you can snag a free license. Copy the coupon code and click on the link below. Good luck!
Coupon Code = 495EF2BE
Priced at $39, with free updates for one year, Photology is affordable, but why would you pay $39 when there are so many alternative free cataloging/image editing apps out there? Photology believes its market advantage is the "automatic tagging," which frees users from the limitations of folders and file names, while also avoiding "tag explosion" that many users experience.
So for instance, if you wanted to find the photo of your daughter in a green shirt for a
Photology will then filter all your photos for the particular shade of green you're looking for. If you want to search for a photo but can only remember the time of day it was taken, you can search by morning, noon, afternoon, and night. Of course, as your math teacher would say, the data output is only as good as the input, and if your camera clock settings are whacked (which is what Photology searches by), well, you can figure the rest out. This might not be the best filter for you to use.
The date filter is also extremely useful if you want to view by a particular month, however, your math teacher's admonition still applies. See above for detail.
To help with the whacked data issue a future release will have the ability to let you "train" photos. This would allow you to take anything that Photology thinks and manually override it. Example: for photos that were taken while the camera had the wrong date/time, you could go into the photo and tell Photology to treat the photo as a Morning, Afternoon, Evening or Night.
Location
Photology allows you to filter by location, either inside or outside. The inside filter worked really well and captured all the photos that were taken inside. The outside filter tended to also capture a few photos that were taken inside. We asked Steven Kim how that could happen and the long and short of it is, if your inside photos are well-lit and taken without a flash, it can sometimes lead the filter astray.
Features
Another way to search is using the feature filter. Here you can search for photos by exposure, focus, monotone, horizontal, vertical, and black/white. This is a good filter to use to find all the the photos that need tweaking and a). correct them or b). delete.
Content
The content filter allows you to search by water, faces, flowers, plants, beach, snow, sky and sunset. We searched by water and pulled up a few non water items, but the good news is, all the water photos did get picked up. Photology seemed to pick up a particular shade of blue for water items, including a car's license plate. (You gotta hand it to them, it's super thorough).
Text
You can also search by text, that is, if you have already tagged your photos. If not, this won't be particularly useful, however, in Photology, they make it easy for you to tag your photos if you're so inclined. The search also works on file names. So if you've already renamed your photos based on content ("Dobie birthday.jpg"), you can use text search for "dobie" or "birthday".
Tools
Photology comes with some basic photo imaging tools such as red eye eliminator, color correction, crop and rotate. They work great and are useful for quick touch-ups. Photology is non-destructive, so any edits to photos are tracked, but not stored as a separate "adjusted version" of the photo. The program just keeps track of "this photo needs these adjustments added to it," and leaves the original photo alone.
Groups
You can select photos to put in a separate group with whatever you name you choose. Groups are better than folders because a photo can be in as many groups as you want without having multiple copies of the photo scattered all over your hard drive.
Sharing
What's the point of searching and finding all your photos if you can't share? Photology has an easy built-in share program that allows you to send the photo to an obfuscated webshare address (that remains live for 7 days) which you can then copy and paste into an email. You can also save photos to the desktop or upload to Flickr. Photology expects to add more sites to the interface based on feedback it receives from end users.
Photology has a print feature which allows you to print photos either 1, 2, or 4-up to a page.
Ease of use
The program is stunningly simple to use and the fliters do all the work for you. Rather than imposing a rigid organization scheme for you to follow, (when it's clear that dog wont hunt) you can rely on the various search filters to get you what you're looking for. In addition, to help get you acclimated, Photology provides some nice video tutorials. We'd like to see Photology incorporate the ability to see image size data in its next release as well as the ability to print custom sizes.
In the end, it all comes down to the question of price and need. Photology is an innovative app to help you pinpoint your vast photo collection. If you're drowning in thousands of image files, Photology is your new photo librarian and $39 doesn't seem like much to pay for pulling needles out of your image haystack.
Specs
Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista
- 512 MB RAM
- 2 GHz Processor
- 500 MB available hard disk space
- 1024x768 high-color, 32-bit display
The indexing software is based on Lucene.NET, a high performance indexer that maximizes the processing power of new multi-core machines. Photology is also useful on older PCs. To index a single image, it takes about 1 second on a 2 GHz Pentium. Indexing 6000 images on Photology's quad core test rig, took about 30 minutes.
Now, that you've finished reading the post, here's how you can snag a free license. Copy the coupon code and click on the link below. Good luck!