This. Is. Not. Good. It's only my third Quick Takes Friday, and I had not written word one before today.
It's Google's fault. Picasa made me do it.
I had experimented with Google's Picasa back in its early days, and still had a version of Picasa 2 on my machine. I never used it, except occasionally for the image viewer, because I hated the way it took over my machine, and consumed so much space on my hard drive with its thumbnail images. But a friend recently raved about Picasa 3's face recognition ability, and as I was (am) in the middle of working with a large batch of photos, and had been recently blessed with a new 500 Gb drive, I decided to try it out.
WOW.
True, the &*^%$ program still takes over the machine. The first thing Picasa did was spend several hours examining and cataloging all my images, and then at least as long analyzing them for faces. As far as I can tell, there is no way to stop the process other than shutting down the program. Even now, if Picasa is running, even minimized, it will occasionally take up so much of the CPU that it looks as if the machine has crashed. (Mostly, if I'm patient, it will eventually come back.)
But oh, the face recognition is incredible! You train Picasa by identifying "unknown" faces, and it catches on very quickly. Soon it begins offering you suggestions for the identification, and after a while makes its own decisions, asking only that you confirm or correct them. It's really, really good. Occasionally it mistakes one of my daughters for the other, but mostly it's spot on. It is eerily able to extrapolate from a childhood picture to the same person as an adult, and vice versa. It recognizes family relationships: if it makes mistakes in the identification of a child, the suggestion is almost always the mother, father, sibling, or sometimes a cousin. This is what makes Picasa addictive, resulting in the problem noted in QT#1. You'd think the process of adding, correcting, and confirming identifications would be tedious, but it was difficult to pause, even for meals and sleep. I was constantly calling to my husband in the next office, "Come here! You have to see this. You won't believe it!"
I'm finding that it's not quite as impressive now that it's store of possibilities is much larger, but it's still incredible. And hopefully will be incredibly useful. Note that this is not an overall endorsement of Picasa. I haven't used it enough to make a judgement of the software as a whole. But if the police have resources like this, it's no wonder the can identify criminals from security camera photos.
Do you ever get stuck on a project and can't get back into gear because it keeps growing and growing and you can't deal with the new stuff because the old stuff hasn't been dealt with and it keeps preying on your mind but you can't make yourself get back to it because it's all so overwhelming? That's the situation my photo collection was in. Never mind all the physical prints from years back that I still have to identify and label; I'm talking about our digital photos since early 2009, when thousands of pictures from our daughter's wedding caused my system to overload and crash. Not the computer; me.
I'd already learned the lesson about how much can be accomplished if you tackle a project in small, but regular, sessions. ("How to you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.) But I couldn't get started. This week I finally learned another important lesson: Sometimes a mighty effort can break a log jam. I decided to spend four, concentrated hours working on the wedding photos, and made arrangements to have as few interruptions as possible.
As usual, things take much longer than expected, even with relatively few interruptions: In four hours I didn't even finish preparing and organizing the photos, much less do any sorting, analyzing, culling, or labelling. But it was enough to break the mental block, and I'm back on track to finish in, maybe, 2020 or so.
Speaking of overload—at the risk of being a bit incestuous by referencing a post at Conversion Diary, which hosts 7QTF, Jen's post on how she deals with feeling overwhelmed rang so many bells with me I thought I must be caught in a clock tower at noon.
I have a personality type that leads me to feel overwhelmed a lot. I’m ambitious but lazy; I have a latent perfectionist streak that comes out at unexpected times; I’m an Olympian procrastinator; and I’m so non-confrontational that I often find myself saying “Yes, I’d love to help with that” when what I should be saying is, “I CANNOT EVEN FIND TIME TO BRUSH MY HAIR RIGHT NOW, LET ALONE SIGN UP FOR ONE MORE FREAKING THING.”
To her excellent four-step survival plan—Get your physical environment in order, Get some sleep, Pray — preferably outside of the house, and Talk through it—I would add one more: Exercise. Because exercise takes extra time, it tends to go out the window when I'm feeling pressed. I can whittle a two-hour shopping trip down to 30 minutes if I drive instead of walking. When deadlines loom, even a half-hour run seems too time-consuming. But just as with prayer, sleep, and order, it seems that the busier I am, the more important physical activity becomes.
I haven't had time to play with it much (see QT#2), but I've discovered AreYouInMyPhoto.com, a site for identifying old (and not-so-old) photographs and the people in them. If enough folks get involved, this could become a great resource for genealogists and others with mystery photos. I'm hoping it will also save old pictures from being tossed simply because no one knows who might appreciate them.
Another genealogical resource that can be fun for almost everyone is FindAGrave.com. Thousands of volunteers have scoured cemeteries and uploaded gravestone information, sometimes with photographs. Do you wonder where suffragist Susan B. Anthony is buried? If, like me, you went to the University of Rochester, you know her grave is in nearby Mt. Hope Cemetery. But ordinary mortals can find out the same information through Find A Grave. Would you like a photograph of your great-grandfather's gravestone but can't manage a trip to Nebraska? Check it out; someone may have done the work for you already. Find A Grave is always growing, and I have often hit a brick wall in my research only to come back three months later and find exactly what I needed.
Thirty-two years ago, as I write this, I was within seven minutes of the culmination of a 20-hour ordeal. Only a saint can see the glory to come while yet in the midst of suffering, but it's a lesson first-time mothers never forget. Happy birthday, Dearest Daughter!
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