I’m on Windows, so I was thinking of running “attrib +r *.* /s” before running Picasa, and then “attrib -r *.* /s” afterward. It’s a little tedious, but better than risking metadata corruption.

I think you’re on a Mac, so are you doing a chmod? Do you do it every time you run Picasa?

I generally keep all my images readonly. I don’t know why you’d ever need your images to be writable, so perhaps just leaving them readonly will be sufficient. (I don’t use Picasa, so it’s not really an issue for me.) —Jeffrey

That might be difficult because Lightroom doesn’t let a plugin update GPS data, nor let one plugin update the data for another (such as the faces plugin updating the data for my geoencoding plugin). I’ll have to give it some thought… —Jeffrey

http://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/documentation/GenericGuidelines/index.htm?turl=Documents%2Fiptcextensiondescriptionoftheimagesection.htm

Keywords make for a much better experience within Lightroom because of the tools that Lightroom has for editing and searching keywords. The IPTC field (which I’d not heard of until you pointed it out) would perhaps be better when sharing images with third parties who expect fully-populated IPTC data, but my gut tells me that there will be little intersection between that and “folks who use face recognition on their snapshots”. In the end, I should probably have the plugin do both, but it would be difficult to keep the IPTC field up to date because the plugin is not informed when someone changes keywords themselves. Maybe in a future version of Lightroom… —Jeffrey

I just found this plugin now, and I don’t know why I didn’t earlier. Wrote a script about a year ago, in Perl, that just moved data from Picasa files over into xmp-files.

Haven’t updated it, and have had some bug reports, but now I might not bother. Will have to check out your plugin instead.

If curious my script is on my blog

For most of my pictures I have RAW (NEF) files and the corresponding JPGs together.

I have set Picasa to only look for JPGs as if I choose both, it will always display two images (RAW and JPG) separately and also I would have to tag the faces twice, which is a lot of unnecessary work.

However, when I only have the JPGs tagged, Lightroom doesn’t import those keywords with your importer. It seems to only look for the name of the raw file in Picasa, and as it does’nt find anything (remember I tag only JPGs).

Do you think you could change the plugin so that it looks not only for the raw (NEF, CR2, DNG and so on) but also for the JPG and set the keyword if any of these files is tagged in Picasa?

I’m not on a system with Picasa so it’s a blind change, but I just pushed a new version that might actually handle this situation… give it a try and let me know. —Jeffrey

I had dismissed Picasa early on because the terms said (as I recall) I would give up all rights to images put into the Picasa system. However, that is so outrageous I would guess that has changed by now.

I’m also generally cautious about Google because of the difficulty of ever reaching anyone regarding support issues. I use Gmail extensively, and successfully for the most part. Its incompatibility between its method of keeping Contact info, and Apple’s Mobile Me and iPhone is my only problem at the moment (basically to avoid rampant duplication I had to disconnect the two, so now I have to enter contacts in both places).

So before jumping into this, I want to explore at least one other possibility; one that involves Apple (a company that is accessible and reliable, in my experience):

QUESTION: I’ve been thinking that there must be a way to use Aperture 3 for facial recognition by giving Aperture access to my LR3 image collection. My big concern is that I would need to know exactly how Aperture might alter the EXIF (or IPTC) keywords, and secondly that it wouldn’t mess with anything else.

If Jeffrey or anyone reading this has some thoughts on this, I’d be very grateful.

I live in a suburb of Philadelphia, PA (USA) and use SmugMug as my online image location. I’ve greatly enjoyed reading Jeffrey’s blog and other writings, and his fabulous pictures.

Thanks,

Skip

For my part, I don’t know anything about Aperture, but perhaps someone else does…. —Jeffrey

Thank you! Because this will make my summer quite a bit easier. (I have to put together a few slideshows at the summer camp I work at).

And sorry because I couldn’t donate more. I spend most all my savings to get a plane ticket to camp.. student salary is lame.

Anyway, I really REALLY appreciate that you give such a long trial period and allow us to donate whatever! That really is fantastic.

Thanks again,
Keep up the good work!

Should I overwrite with Lightroom? I just want to preseve my lightroom tags.

Thanks for the wonderful program

This is unrelated to the plugin. Lightroom is telling you that someone modified the master image on disk since Lightroom last read the metadata from it, and so it’s alerting you to this, and asking whether it should throw away the data in Lightroom and replace it with a fresh copy from the image on disk, or should it ignore whatever is in the image on disk and keep what’s currently in Lightroom. I suspect Picasa is updating the file with its own data, and that unless you want that data (whatever it is) to overwrite what’s in Lightroom, you want to ignore the changes on disk. —Jeffrey

Incidentally, I have worked out another workaround, which is simply to rename all the people in Picasa. It’s not exactly perfect, but it should at least solve my problem.

I’m interested that you mention not many people use this plugin. I wasn’t aware of that. I guess that facial recognition technology is still pretty new, but I’m surprised more people aren’t trying it out. Personally I’m finding it useful in my work as well as at home. I work as a teacher at a high school with 750 students, and I’m in charge of photography at the school. Being able to automate the process of tagging people is a big help. At home, I use it for family photos, but the real benefits are from tagging pictures of my wife’s dance studio, because there are way too many pictures to tag people manually.

There’s a lot of room for further development, but I’m already finding it to be quite a time saver.

A truly small feature request is fairly rare… what seems small ends up spiraling into a big production when all lose ends are taken into account. This is very much such a case… I started to add this, then realized an edge condition that caused some troubles, and in dealing with that found myself in a full-blown rewrite of the plugin. After wasting too much time on it, common sense finally won over…. it’s just not worth that much effort for such a small thing in a plugin used by so few people. Sorry. Maybe some day. —Jeffrey