Just a short followup to last week's "Giving Up on Picasa Face Recognition" post, I've gone ahead and released the Lightroom plugin I'd built before realizing the major problems plaguing Picasa's face-recognition feature. If you've invested time in Picasa's face recognition, use Lightroom, and are lucky, the plugin may be of use.

Here it is:    Jeffrey’s "Picasa Face-Recognition Import" Lightroom Plugin

I've just wasted the last two days on something more fun (and more frustrating) than any video game – Google's Picasa photo app "face recognition" stuff.

Google's Picasa desktop photo application includes the very cool feature of face recognition. Point it at a photo and it will identify where in the photo faces are to be found, and do so with great precision. I pointed Picasa at the 20,000 photos in my archive from this year (maybe 100,000 faces?) and there were no false positives, unless you don't count sculptures of faces as a face. Very impressive.

But like a [...]
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It was more amazing than I could have possibly imagined. It was overwhelming. I am so exhausted (from it, and from not having slept last night trying to build a plugin for Adobe Lightroom to import face-recognition data from Google's Picasa photo app) that I have not even unloaded my images from the camera.

But Paul, who has never used Lightroom, wanted to give it a try, so I loaded his images and gave him about a minute's instruction, and let him loose. Having been inspired by some of Stéphane Barbery's recent work – such as his Jidai Matsuri shots, [...]

The initial destination of my photo outing with Paul Barr yesterday (the one where we discovered the workshop of Nishimura Stone Lanterns) was to visit the Nitenji Temple, nestled up in the mountains of north-east Kyoto, perched precariously over the ravine on the road over to Otsu.

After the outing, we returned to my place and I introduced Lightroom to him, and in using random photos from the day to demonstrate things you could do within Lightroom's Develop module, I happened upon the soft-focus creamy effect you see above. I liked the effect in this case, so I decided to [...]

This makes 19 plugins for Adobe Lightroom that I've released, all available on my Lightroom Goodies page.

(This post previously mentioned a second new plugin, "Bulk Titler", but I've withdrawn it because it turns out Tim Armes' LR/Transporter plugin, which I knew did a lot of things related to metadata import and export, also does exactly what my little plugin did. My "Bulk Titler" was almost a throw-away little thing, but LR/Transporter is a first-class professional tool, so I'm happy to point you to it.)