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It’s been a long time since I blogged about the tools I use on my computer to deal with my photos. Looking back, I had these articles:
- Jan 2006: Windows 98 to Windows XP
On Windows 98, I was using JASC Paint Shop Photo Album 5. When I got a new computer with Windows XP, JASC had been bought out by Corel. I found that JASC Photo Album continued to work on XP without problem, so I continued to use it. - April 2009::Picture Management and Editing in Windows Vista
where I talked about my transfer from Windows XP to Vista. On XP, I had tried Adobe PhotoShop Elements, Google Picasa and Corel Photo Album. On Vista I was expecting to try Windows Live Photo Gallery which included face recognition.
At that point, I did start using Windows Live Photo Gallery and I really liked it.
The last release of Windows Live Photo Gallery was in 2012, and Microsoft stopped supporting it and made it unavailable in 2017. I continued using it on my next computer I purchased in 2014 with Windows 8.1.
- Mar 2020: When Everything Fails at Once
My computer failed spectacularly, but fortunately the drive with all my photos and videos was fine. For it’s replacement, the Windows 10 computer I am still using today, I decided not to install Windows Live Photo Gallery, but look for something new, thinking that maybe Microsoft Photos which was included with Windows might be okay even if it did not have face recognition at the time.
Tag That Photo
Microsoft Photos just didn’t do it for me. It didn’t work the way I worked. I needed something better that I liked.
Then I ran across a program with a special purpose. It would import the thousands of tags that I added to my pictures in Windows Live Photo Gallery and write them as metadata in Adobe’s XMP format into each picture. This would preserver the thousands of faces and other tags that I had added over the years in photo gallery.
The program is called TagThatPhoto. It also has Face Recognition. After I got it and imported all my Photo Gallery tags, I then spent probably a month going through all my photos with the program’s help, to tag as many more photos as I could. My current count is sitting at over 18,000 faces tagged with another 24,000 being faces of people who are not relevant to me.
However, face tagging was really all TagThatPhoto was good for. It did not really help me at organizing my photos like Windows Live Photo Gallery did. So I was in need of something else.
digiKam
I wanted something that would do all the organization for me. I searched for several months for a program with face recognition that would allow me organize all my files into topics, include the ability to locate my photos on a map, along with tagging, captioning, editing and even a capability to find duplicates. There weren’t too many programs that impressed me.
Then I ran into digKam. Not only did it seem to have everything I needed, but it was Open Source and free as well. I downloaded it and put it through its paces.
You could see the tabs at the left are: Albums, Tags, Labels, Dates, Timeline, Search, Similarity, Map, People – basically all I needed.
But it turns out digiKam for me isn’t the right program. I just don’t like the user interface. I found it slow in rendering the photos and difficult to get around. It really is a Unix program that is ported to work also on Windows and to me it felt like it.
Mylio
So then it came to be time for RootsTech 2023 in Salt Lake City. I’m not attending this year but was looking very forward to its live streamed and pre-recorded sessions.
What I discovered was one of the conference’s sponsors: Mylio Photos. The more I watched their explanatory videos, the more intrigued I became. Here is a full-featured photo organization program that I was very surprised I had never heard of before. Checking out the Mylio website (which is beautiful by the way), I was surprised to see they are up to Version 22.1. So they are not a new company and have been around for a while.
I am very impressed by the program’s advertised capabilities, the user interface of the program, and the company’s videos and presentation of their program.
This is not a free program. They charge $99 a year. But if the capabilities are this good and if I enjoy using it as much as I did Windows Live Photo Gallery, then it will be worth every penny.
Tonight, I will install and try it out.
Evening progress:. I bit the bullet. Purchased a year subscription on their RootsTech special offer ($20 off + 2 bonuses), installed it and started loading my photos.
I’ve got 2 main folders with photos, one in my Pictures directory and another that is mostly trip photos that are in my OneDrive folder on my computer that get synched with OneDrive. My Pictures directory had 30,198 pictures and videos in it. They took about an hour for Mylio to index and then started to generate thumbnails, detect faces and scan for text.
I think this program’s a keeper.It does so much. Rather than me try to explain, I’ll leave you with this RootsTech presentation by Rich Harrington from Mylio.
Followup: March 4, 2023. After spending many hours over the past few days with Mylio, I ran into a couple of things it does that do not please me.
- It does not write the XMP into the image file.
- It does create an XMP “sidecar” file with the Mylio information in it.
Not having the XMP info include the face regions and other changes in the file is not a good thing. If the picture is moved without the same-named .xmp file, then the info is lost. And a lot of programs can’t read the sidecar information.
By comparison, digiKam directly writes the face regions as XMP information into the file and makes changes directly to the file as well. Mylio can read this information, which is good. But digiKam does not read Mylio’s sidecar information. It must be a proprietary format.
I do understand the possible logic that Mylio used in not adding the info directly to the file. With the sidecar file, they do not change the file in any way, and all edits and additions can easily be undone – and they state that.
But if portability is needed and you want those faces and edits to be available to any future photo management program you may decide to use, then Mylio might not be the best. It’s a bit of vendor lock-in which isn’t good.
And having thousands of little .xmp files all over my computer is something I don’t want. I’ve also noticed some 256 x 256 pixel copies of pictures appearing in the same directories.
Those look like thumbnail copies of the full size pictures that Mylio might be using. If a program makes thumbnails, it should keep them in a database that doesn’t add files to someone’s pictures folder.
So I’m afraid it might be back to digiKam for me.
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