18 Sep 2020

Finding Photos Fast with Excire Search in Adobe Lightroom Classic

In early August, I described Excire Foto, a new application that, unlike Excire Search, works outside Lightroom Classic. At the time, I mentioned that Excire had a new version of the plug-in and said I'd tell you more about it later. Well, it's later.

You may remember my review of the initial release of Excire Search in January 2019. Lightroom Classic has facial recognition technology and keywords to help you find the images you're looking for. Excire's plug-in adds generic keywords to your images and fundamentally changes the process of looking for images. Originally Excire offered two versions of Search for Lightroom; the basic program had 125 keywords and the pro version increased the count to 500. Now only the Pro version is offered.

After installing Excire Search 2, it was necessary to initialize all 62,000 files. Needless to say, that took a while. I started the process at 9am and it was still running at 9pm. The job finished overnight and probably consumed about 15 hours. Don't allow this to concern you because it happens only once.

What you might not be expecting is the amount of time required for your next system backup. Excire writes its keywords to generic DNG (digital negative) and JPEG files. That means that most of your images will have changed and will need to be backed up again. It appears that Excire does not write its keywords to proprietary format files such as Canon's CR2 and Nikon's NEF files. This is understandable because structural information about proprietary raw format files is not made public by manufacturers. If you shoot in raw mode, this is another reason why you should have Lightroom Classic convert the files to DNG on import.

 Click any of the small images for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.

Adding keywords to a digital negative file is easy because the file structure includes a section where the information is stored. All of the keywords shown in the photo of my older daughter, her husband, and my younger daughter's dog were added by Excire search. The view in Lightroom Classic is on the left and the digital negative file's keyword section is shown in UltraEdit Studio on the right.

Information is added to JPEG files in the same way. Some of the keywords here are ones I've added (Scampi and Tangerine) and others have been added by Excire Search (Animal, Mammal, Cat, and Pet). Because keywords added by the user and by Excire Search are maintained separately, there's no danger of Excire overwriting the user's manually added keywords.

Search has incorporated some of the features that are in the Excire Foto application, and that makes the plug-in a more robust assistant.

Excire Search in Action

Being able to search by keywords is helpful, but I suspect that many people will reach for the Search for People or Search for Faces function most frequently.

Search for Faces can be set to identify photos that look like a single portrait; have one, two, or several faces; or have any number of faces. The next selection asks for the age of the person or people you're looking for: Baby/toddler, child, teenager/young adult, adult, or elderly. Next is the choice between faces that appear to be of males or females, and whether the subject's eyes are open. The final choices tell Excire search whether to examine the entire catalog or just the current filmstrip, and how many results it should display.

Search for People is faster and amazingly accurate when you need to find additional pictures of one or more individuals in an image. It's important to select a photo that shows a full frontal view of the person's face. In this example, Excire Search would be able to look for other pictures where the woman was present, but not for other images with the man.

If you select a photo that contains just one person, Excire Search will ask if you want additional photos where that person is the only subject or where that person and one, two, or several additional faces are present, or where the person is in a group. You can also specify images where the subject is smiling or not smiling and where the subject's eyes are open or closed. You can also add keywords. For example, if the person was at a wedding, you could choose that keyword to limit the images returned to just those of the individual at a wedding. As with Search for Faces, you'll then tell the application whether to search the current filmstrip or the entire catalog, and what is the maximum number of images you want to see. I set the maximum at 960 and told Search to review the entire catalog. It returned 413 images.

When the selected image has more than one face, all of the usable faces will be marked with a rectangle. The user can then choose to search for photos with one of the faces, multiple faces, or all faces in the image. The other selection criteria remain the same. In this example, I told Search to find just photographs with the person on the right (face #2) and to search the entire catalog. I set the maximum at 960 photos and Excire Search returned 960 photos. The number of images is large because the catalog contains hundreds of photographs from the subject's wedding.

Search's artificial intelligence has been improved in version 2. For example, a photo that version 1 identified as being "dark, nature, outdoor, river, water, and waters" is identified by version 2 as "architecture, building, cabin, dark, forest, nature, outdoor, plant, river, tree, water, waterfall, waters, and wood". The new keywords are far more descriptive of the image.

If there's a downside to using Excire Search, it's this: It takes far longer for Lightroom Classic to become ready for use. Presumably this is the result of the massive increase in keywords. Instead of being ready to use in 30 seconds or less, Lightroom Classic now takes more than a minute. The user can wait, stare at the computer, and be annoyed (after all, any time spent waiting on a computer is wasted). Alternatives include starting Lightroom Classic and going to fetch the beverage of your choice, take a bathroom break, or converse with a pet or family member. Considering the amount of time Excire Search will save when you need to find an image, the somewhat slower startup time seems like more than a fair deal.

 Excire Search 2 finds photos quickly and precisely

Adobe Lightroom Classic's face recognition is good, but Excire's technology seems to be better. Lightroom Classic's keywords are superb if you remember to add them, but Excire adds keywords that you might not think of when you're adding terms manually. The keywords are responsible for much of Search's power because the generic keywords make searching easier, and the application's image analysis will fundamentally change the way users look for images.
Additional details are available on the Excire website.
The cat rating scale ranges from 0 cats (worst) to 5 cats (best).

Short Circuits

Facebook's New Interface Is Terrible, or Maybe it's Not

I've been watching messages from Facebook users who have been switched to the new interface. With few exceptions, people say they hate it. They say that it looks like it was designed by a four-year-old. Sometimes they even say nasty things about it. I'm going to play the part of the heretic: A few weeks ago Facebook said all users will be converted to the new interface in September, so maybe I would like to switch now. Fearing the worst, I switched.

It's different. It looks more like the Android and IOS apps. But is "different" bad? Some people do not like change. Period. I am not one of those people. But that's not to say that all is well in Facebook land.

Problems have always existed with Facebook, and the new version doesn't change that. For example:

1. The new version uses a significant amount of screen real estate at the top of the page to highlight Stories. These are short photo and video collections that can be viewed up to two times and disappear after 24 hours. In other words, it's Facebook's lame attempt to copy Snapchat. To say that I detest Stories with a passion would probably be an understatement. I despise them.
2. There's a icon for watching videos that Facebook thinks will interest me. I occasionally watch videos on an IPad, but almost never on a desktop system. The icons, in order, are: Home, Pages that I manage, Videos, Marketplace, and Groups. I also don't care for Facebook Marketplace.
3. The Sponsored section is another area that I don't care for, but if this replaces (or at least reduces) the number of ads that appear in my timeline, I'll live with it. That's still not determined. If the flood of ads continues, I hope that I'll be able to reduce them.
4. But wouldn't it be nice to get rid of at least some of the features I don't like?

That's why I'm a long-time user of Social Fixer, a plug-in that has been able to filter out advertisements and unwanted posts. Facebook has massively modified its code, and Social Fixer developer Matt Krause has been working overtime to fix what Facebook's new code has broken.

Social Fixer is free, but donations are accepted and anyone who uses Social Fixer to fix Facebook really should donate. Although the latest version doesn't fix everything, it allows me to remove the Videos and Marketplace icons.

More important, though, Social Fixer makes it possible to hide the Stories "feature". It's not yet possible to hide the Sponsored section that is linked to the Your Pages, Birthdays, and Contacts sections.

So really there's no good reason to dislike the new Facebook layout. It seems to be better than the old layout on many ways, and it will be even better when Matt Krause fully updates Social Fixer to give users control of what they see.

Social Fixer is a plug-in for all major browsers, but it not available for Facebook apps on Android and IOS devices. At least not yet. We can always hope.

Dazed and Confused by Old Stuff and New Stuff

Maybe you've seen the video with a couple of 17-year-old guys who are given a rotary phone and told that they have to make a call. Clearly rotary dial phones were not "discoverable" as Apple likes to say about their modern hardware. Some things puzzle young folks, and others cause us older folks to raise our eyebrows.

This occurred to me the other day when I was making sure that my pencil was fully charged. Until recently, the only way to charge a pencil would have been to buy one with a credit card; but now we have devices with pencils that have to be charged.

If you found it amusing that two high school students were so clueless about how to operate an old telephone that it took them four minutes to more or less figure it out ...

... consider this: In the 1930s, Bell Telephone added a short explanatory film to the newsreel section at theaters to show people how to use a dial phone. Newsreels are another subject entirely, so I'll stick with just the subject of the telephone company film for now. People had to be told how to find telephone numbers, what the dial tone sounded like, how to dial the number, and how to differentiate between ring and busy signals. So don't laugh at the teen guys.

Things change, and we forget how the old things worked. Consider what would happen if you handed your teenage child or grandchild some of the old tools that you took for granted and used without a second thought.

Things like ...

• Fifty-foot reels of 8mm movie film and movie cameras. Would your local teen be able to load the film and record a movie? Keep in mind that each reel of film was good for about three to four and a half minutes of silent action (depending on how many frames per second). We didn't have 8mm sound film until the mid-1960s. If you wanted to get fancy, you could cut and splice the film, but there was no undo.
• Typewriters. Remember how hard you had to press the keys on manual typewriters and how much better the electric typewriters were? Remember erasing errors? Remember Wite-Out (and failing grades from your typing teacher if you used it)? Remember having to retype the entire document when you edited it? Or having to type multiple copies if you needed to send more than one?
• Remember early computers. Would any teenager today understand the need to delete one document from the hard drive just to make room for another? Given that every digital camera image can be 30 to 50 megabytes (or more), what would they think of a computer with a 10 megabyte hard disk?
• Given a Rand McNally atlas and a pad of paper, would your teenage child or grandchild be able to plan a route to drive across the country?
• How many people of any age would put up with looking through a printed catalog, filling out an order form, mailing the form, and waiting several weeks for the ordered item to arrive?
• Hand a teenager a slide rule and ask them to calculate something. Somewhere around the house I have two slide rules, but I bought them just as calculators were coming out — calculators that had a big box under the table, a keypad on the table, and a separate box with a bunch of Nixie tubes. If you don't know what a Nixie tube is, Wikipedia has a good explanation. Anyway, I never really mastered using a slide rule because they were no longer needed.
• Do you recall walking, riding a bike, or maybe driving to the bank to deposit a check? You had to go inside the bank, take your account book, and talk with a teller. And you'd better be there before 2pm because that's when banks closed so they could balance the books by 5pm. And they weren't open on Saturday or Sunday.
• How about shortwave radio? The sound was usually horrid, but you could listen to people half a world away. Here's an example of Radio Canada International.
  
  Most shortwave stations have signed off and have been replaced by online services, but there was still something magic about being able to listen to Ottawa, London, Moscow, Prague, Havana, and other stations. For more information about shortwave broadcasting, see the Shortwave Archive, which is where I obtained the Radio Canada International audio.
• Would any of us, young or old, be satisfied with just four, or maybe three or only two, television stations? As a kid in Bellefontaine, I benefited from an outdoor antenna on what was probably a 40-foot mast. Because of that and because of Bellefontaine's elevation, we had a choice of three Columbus stations, two Dayton stations, and occasionally one or two Cincinnati stations. Except for news and local programming, the stations in all three cities ran exactly the same network programs from exactly the same three networks.

What else? Remember television sets that took up half a room, sat on the floor, and required you to get up and walk to them to change channels with a rotary dial. Vinyl records that required you to buy the whole thing when it had only two or three selections you really liked? (Yeah, vinyl is making a small comeback.) The battle over which was better: VHS tapes or Betamax? Remember the sound of a modem connecting and negotiating with the device on the other end? How about floppy disks? The 5-inch disks that flopped; if you're old enough, the 8-inch disks that really flopped; and the 3-inch floppy disks that didn't flop at all unless you took them out of their plastic cases. Remember using a floppy disk to boot the computer because the computer had no internal drive? Did you ever use a dumb terminal to connect to a mainframe or minicomputer? How about using jumpers to set interrupts or to assign a device number to a SCSI drive. Have you written a real letter in the past decade and had the post office deliver it? Oh — and remember when we had to use phone books, the Yellow Pages, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and newspapers?

Spare Parts

Adobe MAX Goes Virtual

One of the highlights for users of Adobe products each year is Adobe MAX. The annual event attracts tens of thousands of people from all over the world. Well, that's not going to happen this year. Instead, Adobe is sponsoring a virtual three-day event.

Adobe is inviting creatives to design this year's event and they've changed the name to CoCreate: MAX. Those who apply and are accepted will be paid to work on materials that will be highlighted during the program. CoCreate: MAX will highlight graphic design, illustration, motion media, and what Adobe calls Wildcard: "Want to make us a playlist? Or maybe some memes? Let’s get creative."

The in-pereson Adobe MAX requires airfare, lodging, and a substantial cost to attend. The virtual event is being offered for free and will include three full days of speakers, celebrity appearances, musical performances, global collaborative art projects, and more than 350 breakout sessions.

For more information about CoCreate: MAX, see Adobe's blog, and you can register to attend the virtual program for free.

Learning New Skills in a Time of Covid-19

Microsoft and LinkedIn are working together to help millions of people learn or improve digital skills. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says an estimated 800 million people will need to learn new skills for their jobs in the next 10 years. Microsoft's estimates suggest that global unemployment this year could reach a quarter of a billion people.

LinkedIn has joined with Microsoft to address the needs based on three primary points: Using data to identify the skills needed for in-demand jobs, providing free access to learning paths that help people develop needed skills, and free job-seeking tools for those who need new jobs.

Access to LinkedIn is provided without charge through many libraries, but CEO Ryan Roslansky says that the company will provide access to ten learning paths for free to anyone. These range from learning software development, sales, and project management skills to paths that lead to becoming a data analyst, a financial analyst, or a graphic designer.

Microsoft will also offer free technical education through Microsoft Learn, and LinkedIn has created four additional learning paths employees and job seekers can use to make themselves more competitive: Job Seeker, Critical Soft Skills, Digital Transformation, and Allyship and Inclusive Conversations.

For more information, visit Microsoft's Global Skills Initiative website.

Twenty Years Ago: High Speed Internet had a Different Meaning

In September 2000, I grumbled about slow internet access: "For the past 9 days, I've had only slow internet access -- 24 Kbps is the best I've been able to get from my hotel room. That's a huge difference from what I expect from the office (fractional T1) or home (Roadrunner). It makes me appreciate what I have and reinforces my feeling that the Internet will become a true market force only when broadband access is more widely available."

We're still waiting for ubiquitous high-speed access, and the United States continues to lag behind other developed countries, paying much more for substantially inferior service.

And this hasn't changed much from what I wrote 20 years ago: "The big service providers typically claim 90+% coverage for the entire country, but if you look at the small print, that's often 90% of metropolitan areas. If the metro areas cover 20% of the US land mass (and that number is no more than a guess), then 80% of the land mass doesn't even have local internet service from the large, national providers -- to say nothing of high-speed access."