New Identification Technology for Digital Photos

This is a Family Tree Magazine advertiser-sponsored post from Tag That Photo.

A vital part of documenting family history is identifying people in our family photos. From scanning old pics found in shoeboxes and albums, to curating hundreds —or thousands—of digital photos, it’s often a challenging and time-consuming process.

Tag That Photo is a new software application installed and operated locally on your Windows desktop or laptop. It uses leading-edge face recognition technology to automate the tagging process. This helps make the task of photo organization more productive and enjoyable versus frustrating and laborious.

While it’s true lots of software uses face recognition these days, Tag That Photo’s face recognition technology differs in that it is incredibly accurate and manages large photo libraries extremely efficiently. As it scans your photo folders, it detects faces. As faces are detected, you’ll add names to them. These are called “name tags” or “face tags”. The more faces tagged, the smarter Tag That Photo gets at recognizing and suggesting names. It will also group or cluster like-looking people together, so tagging can be done faster with fewer keystrokes.

Preserving photo “history” with embedded metadata

You’ve added a bunch of face tags… now what? A valuable feature – and one that sets Tag That Photo apart from others – is that tagging done in Tag That Photo is “embedded” into your photos. Like preserving family history, embedding face tags helps preserve the integrity of a photo’s “history” which is also known as its metadata.

Metadata includes info such as date taken, location, description, and people. Embedding photo metadata is valuable because it doesn’t lock you into using one software app or a proprietary database. Since it isn’t using a proprietary database, it also means Tag That Photo “plays nicely” with other photo applications you may be using such as Adobe Lightroom and MS Photo Gallery.

Embedded Metadata

If you’ve spent hours and hours tagging your photos, only to lose them because the application you’re using goes under or is no longer available, you’ll typically lose all that hard work. Cloud providers are known for this. Tag That Photo’s embedded metadata puts you in control of your photos and personal information. (Read our blog post, Making Metadata Work, for more info.)

Tagging also helps you find photos quickly, saving tons of time sifting through photos to find specific people. You can export your Tag That Photo search results and create a photo book for mom and dad’s anniversary, or perhaps a slideshow for grandma’s 80th birthday. Using the TTP metadata tags, and a free app called Exiftool, you can generate a .txt or .csv Catalog Report that includes photo names, people tags, and any other metadata.

Collaborate with family members

Collaborating with family members is a big part of creating your family tree. Even though we’re downloaded locally to your computer, the Tag That Photo Family Plan is designed for collaboration, with three licenses included with the subscription. Each license is installed locally on a separate computer or laptop. You identify the folder where photos are to be scanned by Tag That Photo and start adding tags. As long as the folder is shared (via Dropbox or Google Drive or local file server) , the other users will be able to view your TTP tagging activity and add additional ones.

Protecting your online privacy

Technology companies have made it extremely easy to store and manage our photos, often by pushing our photos and their data to the cloud. What many users don’t realize is that, once your pic is in the cloud, you’ve effectively given them the keys to that photo’s future. Even the big cloud providers can’t guarantee your personal information is protected from hacking. Putting our users in control of their personal photos and data is of primary importance to us. If you don’t care about your online privacy, we’re not for you. If you do, we hope you’ll give us a try.

Try us free for 30 days – no credit card needed

If you’re interested in automated photo organization that’s easier and want more control over your photos and personal information, try Tag That Photo free for 30 days. There’s no credit card needed, so there’s no risk.

For a limited time, Family Tree readers can Try Now or Buy Now and save 50% with promo code: FAMTREE.”