[canada_dry]

I'd love to find one that incorporates the functionality that Picasa (windows desktop) circa 2000 i.e. face recognition/matching.

It was way ahead of it's time, and actually worked!

Best of all, it did everything locally... not cloud based and thus retained privacy of your personal photo collection.

[bloopernova]

Picasa was so useful, so of course Google had to kill it.

It took multiple disparate photo directories and presented everything in a timeline of folders. And because everything was local, that happened quickly, rather than waiting for your browser to get the next 100 photo results from a javascript call or whatever.

Are there any photo clients for windows that present multiple folders as a single coherent timeline? And can manage tens of thousands of pictures? I've got stuff going back to the late 1990s and would love to be able to find all those old cat pictures or whatever.

[mceachen]

> Are there any photo clients for windows that present multiple folders as a single coherent timeline?

PhotoStructure does this (and I believe is the only software that does robust time zone inference, as well). (I've posted elsewhere here with more details).

[bloopernova]

I'm now trying Shotwell, installed in my WSL Ubuntu instance under Windows, displaying to VcXsrv. Thankfully it can import-in-place rather than trying to copy gigabytes of photos. We'll see if it copes OK with the funky permissions and file layout I've got set up.

[jamesbr]

I use and like Mylio (https://mylio.com/). Does face recognition & syncs to other devices without being in the cloud. I migrated from Aperture/Picasa to Mylio.

[hazz99]

Google Photos does some really handy stuff with facial recognition, which was super helpful when searching & collating photos.

Doesn't help much for privacy, however.

[alphabettsy]

Privacy is a major point of concern along with the fact that friends might use this service submitting photos of people who maybe don’t want this tech used on their likeness.

[froindt]

My biggest complaint is how long it takes for facial recognition to occur. I like searching by name, and if I do a large upload, I might have to wait a couple weeks to get the groupings. I don't get a push notification, I have to go check and suddenly I have 100 faces to tag.

[dashundchen]

Digikam has facial recognition and tagging using OpenCV. Can't speak to its accuracy though.

[canada_dry]

This looks promising! Thanks.

[mceachen]

I started writing PhotoStructure because I got tired of being burned by failed open and closed source media apps. I wrote more details about it in a top level post, but this blog post describes why I quit my job to do this full time, where the project is currently, and where it's going. https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/

I'd love to have you try out the beta and have you share feedback!

[bpye]

I've signed up for your beta.

One question though - if you end up feeling it's unsustainable to continue developing PhotoStructure down the line do you have a plan? Obviously we would rather not be burned by it either, you you consider at that point making it open source so existing users can continue and make improvements?

Certainly I hope it never comes to it but it's nice to have a little reassurance.

[mceachen]

The "photo app" market is a zombie apocalyptic wasteland of failed and undead software. I don't want to get burned again, either, so:

1) There's a corporate mandate to open-source PhotoStructure for Desktop in the event of business closure.

2) Your library consists of industry-standard files. If you choose to do so, your originals are copied into a standard YYYY/YYYY-mm-dd/ folder hierarchy. XMP sidecars are added to hold inferred or novel metadata and store nondestructive edits, like rotation. A SQLite db (with commented schema! it's pretty, honest!) holds asset-file-tag relationships, albums, and other non-file metadata.

3) It's just me, and I love open source, so if I can get to the point where my licensing stream pays for food and shelter, I can open source then.

[canada_dry]

Signed up, though a quick browse I wasn't able to find any mention of face matching/recognition.

It's really the killer-feature that made Picassa so great - find all the photos over several years of a family member or friend.

Sadly, I've needed this feature for funeral photo albums lately and could really use the old Picassa!

[mceachen]

Face detection is one of the next things I'm building, along with sharing.

[canada_dry]

Great!

Sorry if I missed it, but is it possible (API or directly) to control Photostructure via python?

That way we could extend the features in many interesting ways - including our own face/object detection.