06 January 2019

Finding the Image You Want Just Got Easier

It's not unusual for people to have tens of thousands of digital photographs on their computers and that can make finding the one you want difficult. Those who use Lightroom and religiously add keywords when they import the images will have an easier task, but a lot of people don't take the time. So maybe we need to hire someone to curate our images.

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Curate is a perfectly reasonable term and its use in the meaning of organizing and caring for art works goes back to just before my mother was born, and she was born in 1910, but curate seems to be the a trendy new word that marketers and PR folks work in whether it fits or not. So you don't need someone (or something) to curate your tens of thousands of images. What you need is someone (or something) to organize your tens of thousands of images and then help you find the ones you're looking for. Enter Excire Search, a plug in for Lightroom Classic on either Windows or MacOS.

Excire Search uses artificial intelligence to examine all of your images, analyze their content, and classify them so that it can direct you to the images you're looking for. The initial process takes a while. For my 67,000 images, the initialization process consumed a more than 12 hours. That may seem excessive, but it happens only once.

Following the first initialization run, Excire Search told me that it had indexed nearly 66,000 of my 67,000 images. About 400 images were skipped because they were virtual copies or part of a photo stack. That's not a problem because finding the indexed photo would lead me to the virtual copy. Nine photos were in the Lightroom catalog, but Excire Search couldn't find them. These are likely images that I had deleted incorrectly. Excire Search also found 635 photos that were too small and these are doubtless modified images that I used to store in Lightroom until eventually I determined that's unwise. So no additional action was needed for any of those.

Excire Search also identified 180 images that were too large. These would be panorama images and other modified images. These 180 images were added to a Lightroom collection and Excire Search explained that I could have Lightroom create Smart Previews if I wanted Excire Search to organize them.

I chose to do that and the process took less than a minute.

The version of Excire Search that I tested initially didn't automatically initialize new photographs, so users had to run the initialization process manually. An update released in late December fixed that, but the user does need to visit Lightroom's plug-in manager and change Excire Search's settings.

Excire recommends that when images are substantially modified that the user run an update process so that the program can make note of the changes.

Then It Was Time for Some Fun

Excire Search can search by keyword, by example photo (either a photo in the Lightroom catalog, on your computer, or on the internet), and generally for faces.

The keyword function isn't like Lightroom's built-in function that depends on the user to create the keywords. Instead, Excire Search has its own keywords. The basic program has 125 keywords and a pro version increases the count to 500 keywords. According to Excire, "While the 125 keywords are optimal for the average user, who wants to keep things simple, professional photographers and serious hobbyists work with larger catalogs and will benefit from more refined keywords."

You might be wondering where Excire keeps all of the information it needs to classify images. The database is stored in the same directory as the corresponding Lightroom catalog. The Excire Search file has the same core name as the Lightroom catalog, with the suffix "Excire.excat". Two things surprised me: First, the file isn't stored on the boot drive. Too many applications try to store information there. Second, the file is a lot smaller than I expected it to be. My Lightroom catalog is 1.3GB and the Excire file is less than 500MB. For my first test of the Excire catalog, I chose to search by keyword.

The keywords are divided into two general categories: Image content and image property. Content options (A) include terms such as people, textures, animals, food, and vehicles -- each with many sub-categories. The property options (B) are terms such as bright, colorful, dark, high contrast, and more. There are also check boxes where it's possible to select a dominant color from the image.

Or (C) you can type to see what appears. I started with "cat", knowing that I have a lot of pictures of cats. Nearly 4000 of them. About 3300 ordinary cats, 600 large cats, and a few caterpillars. So I knew cats would be easy and thought I'd try something less common. Chickens.

As it turns out, I have 23 pictures with chickens in them. But if someone had asked me for a picture of a chicken, I probably would have denied having any. The application's artificial intelligence seems to do a good job of examining the images and determining what's there.

Next, I selected a photo of Chloe Cat and selected the Search by Example Photo option.

Excire Search immediately told me that I have a preposterous number of cat pictures and warned me that the search might take a long time. I limited the search results to no more than 1500 pictures and the application returned 1500 cat images in a bout 20 seconds.

Then I gave the Search for Faces option a try, selecting single person, adult, and female as the search options.

A few of the returned images had more than one person in them, but each image had one adult female subject as the main part of the photograph, even when the photograph was of an artwork with an adult female subject.

And Now, the Real Magic

I've spent quite a bit of time in New York City and have a good stock of images from there, but they're scattered throughout the Lightroom catalog and some of them are digitized images from 1980s film. Finding them isn't easy.

So I found a photo of Times Square on a website and grabbed the image's URL. After pasting the URL into Excire Search's dialog box, I told the application to return 100 matching images.

Some of the images Excire Search identified are of Times Square, but many are not. Virtually all of the images are of New York, though. I can forgive the application for suggesting a few photographs from Columbus and other cities because I can't expect it to know every block of every city.

For the final test, I went back to keywords to use multiple selections from the image property choices.

• Bright (the application found 3019 of those)
• Colorful (1814 images are have highly saturated colors)
• High contrast (3609 images have that characteristic)

Three photographs are bright, colorful, and high contrast.

To make the process even easier, add the Excire keywords to the Lightroom catalog. Keywords can be transferred for an individual photograph, all images in a film strip, or all images in the catalog. Adding Excire's keywords to the Lightroom catalog for 65,000 of my 67,000 files took about 11 minutes. In addition to being able to have Excire Search Pro create keywords as images are imported, the user can also specify that the new search terms should be transferred to Lightroom during the import process. Some users will find that this slows the import process, so Excire provides an option to delay the import process for the number of seconds the user specifies. The advantage of doing this is that basic searches can be conducted within Lightroom. Although adding keywords took only a few minutes, Lightroom needed to write the new keywords to non-raw files by creating or updating XMP files. That process took many, many hours.

Does it work? Perhaps you're asking that question just about now. Yes, it does work.

A day or two before Christmas, I needed an image of a pizza. I knew that I had several pizza images, but I didn't know where they might be. Instead of opening Excire Search, I tried the Lightroom keyword search. I hadn't added "pizza" as a keyword, but Excire had recognized several images as ones that contained pizza and, because I had added the Excire keywords to Lightroom, I was presented with a screen full of good choices.

A fully functional trial version that runs for 30 days is available for Search or Search Pro. After the trial period, Search costs $50 and Search Pro costs $100. If you start with Search and want to upgrade to the Pro version, the cost is $55.

Excire Search starts automatically with Lightroom, but takes longer than Lightroom to become functional. In other words, trying to use Search immediately after starting Lightroom will probably display a message that asks you to wait a moment. Likewise, when Lightroom shuts down, Excire takes a few seconds extra to close. Neither of these behaviors is problematic.

 Excire Search and Search Pro make it possible to find the photo you want.

Adobe Lightroom Classic has face recognition technology and keywords to help you find the images you're looking for. Excire's plug-in uses generic keywords and image analysis to fundamentally change the process of looking for images. This is a plug-in that you won't use every day, but will be a valuable addition every time you do need it and this is the kind of recommendation that I rarely make: If you use Lightroom CC Classic, Excire Search is more than just helpful; it's essential.
Additional details are available on the Excire website.

Short Circuits

The Windows 10 October Release (Coming Soon or Maybe Already Here)

When Microsoft released the Windows 10 update (version 1809) in October, consternation ensued. Users of updated computers reported that files and directories were missing. Microsoft quickly withdrew the feature update and it didn't surface again until late December. Your computer may already have version 1809. If not, expect it to be installed soon.

Microsoft pushes updates out on the second Tuesday of every month. These are called B releases because they occur in the second week of the month. Microsoft also makes C and D releases available in the third and fourth weeks of the month and, in an emergency, pushes an out-of-cycle release to users. Most of the updates are security updates, but new and improved features are included about twice a year. The October release is one of those "feature" releases.

I installed version 1809 on a Surface Pro on 17 December and it had already been on a computer that's enrolled in the Windows Insider program since 4 October. In fact, most of the users who received the October update in October had no problems with it, but the problems for a small subset of users were so severe that halting distribution made sense. Version 1809 came to my primary computer on the weekend before Christmas.

So What Are These Features?

1. THE DARK SIDE: There's now an option to choose light or dark for Windows 10 apps. Native Windows apps will honor the setting, but desktop apps won't and a lot of people still use those.
2. TURN YOUR PHONE INTO A MICROSOFT DEVICE: If you want to send texts from the phone app on your computer (next item), you have to install the Microsoft phone app on your phone. This will replace the phone's native launcher or the third-party launcher you've added.
3. SEND TEXTS FROM A PHONE APP: You need to have a smart phone to use this feature and you'll use it by linking the phone app on the computer to the smart phone account. The MyPhone app is included in the update, but you'll then need to install and update a phone app on your phone. This might be enough to make your head hurt.
4. USE THE CLOUD-BASED CLIPBOARD: This could be really useful. It's not on by default, so you'll have to turn it on, but it's now possible to save something to the clipboard on one computer and retrieve it on another. Seriously, this is something that I'll use. It's not uncommon for me to have information on one computer that I'd like to have on another. Saving the text or image to a cloud-based drive or a network drive is easy, but the clipboard is even easier.
5. GRAB SCREEN IMAGES WITH THE SNIPPING TOOL: If you don't have SnagIt, the Snipping tool can substitute, but there seems to be a problem with saving images to the cloud-based clipboard.
6. CHANGE SIZES ON THE SCREEN: Computers with extreme resolution on small screens present hard-to-read text. In addition to the ability to modify overall size, there's now an option to change text size. This is an improvement, but you'll probably spend some time tinkering with it because big, easy-to-read text may cause problems with how things fit on the screen.

New for 2019 on TechByter.com

You may have noticed that I moved the furniture around on the website and painted some of the rooms. This year there are as many behind-the-scenes changes as those that are in your face. Here's what you'll find as you look around.

• Complete re-design: The website has developed over time the way most software projects do in that new features were just bolted on to the existing components. Around the middle of 2018, I started working on a new arrangement that uses virtually none of the existing code and any code that was reused has been re-factored.
• Bootstrap on-line components: Modern websites have a lot of code — HTML5 components, CSS3 components, and Javascript components. The days of trying to design for minimal code are long gone, but methods exist to make even a code-heavy page load faster. Instead of maintaining a full stable of code on the TechByter website, where your browser would have to download it every time, I use BootstrapCDN. Bootstrap is the underlying code and CDN indicates a content delivery network. There are two primary advantages: First, the code is updated regularly to deal with bugs and security issues. Second, because many sites use BootstrapCDN, your browser has probably already cached the code and won't have to download it, so the pages load faster.
• Secure connections: All of the primary pages and the 2019 program pages are secure. Although you can specify HTTPS for pages created in 2018 and before, you'll see a warning that says some insecure elements remain. Secure connections aren't a big deal for a site like TechByter because I don't collect any personal information (other than when you fill out a comment form). Now all pages new are delivered with encryption. Perhaps you noticed a few weasel words. Some pages created before 2019 will report as "insecure" because they contain what's called mixed content. Fixing this would involve updating nearly 1000 pages and I don't plan to do that. The only page where users would share information is the contact page and it is fully secure. Also, because the pre-2019 pages aren't fully HTTPS compatible, I have chosen not to force the use of secure sockets layer (SSL) and the site still uses Transport Security Layer version 1 (TLSv1), which is being phased out. TechByter Worldwide is not an e-commerce site, so this is not an issue. In short, security isn't essential for this site, but enabling it just seemed like a good idea.
• Spare Parts at the bottom: Over the years, I've heard complaints about Spare Parts being on the right side of the page in a thin column and for years I've promised to do something about it. Now, finally, I have and the information is at the bottom of the page. As a result, the main column is wider, so I've increased the amount of space between lines to improve readability.
• HTML5 compliant: HTML5 added a lot of new features, but I've put off using them until most browsers supported the features. All of the major browsers support HTML5 more or less completely, so this seemed to be a good time to stop using some of the old coding and move fully to HTML5.
• Responsive layout: You may read the website on a computer, on a tablet, or on a phone. Screen sizes range from gigantic to tiny and the site is now responsive to changing sizes. Some improvements are still possible, particularly for the smallest screen types, but overall the pages now display readably on all screen sizes.
• Graphical changes: The microphone graphic (an RCA 77DX) is the same as it's been for several years, but the banner and menu now stay at the top of the screen so that they're available even if you're at the bottom of a long page. (If you'd like to read more about the RCA 77DX microphone, you'll find information about it on Wikipedia. It's one of the best microphones ever made and I wish I had one, but even used 77DX microphones in condition that will require an expensive overhaul are priced at $2000 or more. So I'll just stick with my Shure SM7B, which is a fine microphone.)
• No audible podcast changes: You won't hear any changes in the podcast, but some of the production elements have been updated to make them more reliable and starting in late 2018 recordings were mastered directly to the computer instead of to a digital recorder.