But here’s the best thing.  Forever.com’s facial recognition program is the best in the business.  That’s my opinion, and if you use it, I hope you’ll agree.

On Monday morning, I went into the Forever account, saw the pictures, and clicked the people option on the left.  There were all the photos that had unnamed faces. Easy peasy to add names to the images. Forever uses a batch method, grouping images from the same events, so that you can see the context of the unidentified faces.  Once you identify one in the group, it applies to the other images of the same person. 

Interested in a test drive, ask me how. We can set up a free 10-minute Zoom call and a 2 GB account on Forever.com

Why you should use a program with facial recognition?

It’s a time saver.

Over the weekend, I uploaded about 2,000 images to my Forever® account—family photographs, vacation snapshots, and a catch-all of older digital files that had been scattered across devices.

To speed up the process, I upgraded from the free Valet® service to the paid version. The upload itself took only seconds—always a satisfying moment when you’re facing a backlog of images.

But here’s what really impressed me.

Forever’s facial recognition feature is, in my experience, one of the most effective tools available for organizing family photographs.

On Monday morning, I logged in, opened my account, and clicked on the “People” tab. Instantly, I could see groups of images containing unidentified faces. Instead of hunting through folders or guessing, the software brought the problem to me.

Even better, the system groups images by event or context. That means you’re not looking at random faces—you’re seeing people surrounded by visual clues: clothing, companions, locations. That context is exactly what genealogists need to make accurate identifications.

Once I identified one person in a group, the software applied that identification across other images of the same individual. What could have taken hours—or days—was reduced to minutes.

Easy. Efficient. And surprisingly satisfying.

The post Find the Faces Faster: Why Facial Recognition Is a Game-Changer for Family Photos appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

There are hundreds of IPTC fields, and companies select and use only the fields that are relevant to their needs. The SaveMetadata group looked at all of them and selected the ones we thought best suited to genealogists. If there were several description-type fields, we selected the one we thought appropriate. This does not mean that companies use our choices. The chart below illustrates common IPTC fields.

People: Who’s in the photo or who took the picture?

Location: Where was the photo taken?

Caption: This is a brief story of the image as a title, but this can also be a field called description.

Date: Some programs/websites allow for a span of dates or a circa date.

Album: The beauty of digital photo organizers is that you can create multiple digital albums for the same photo.

Keywords: Ever wanted to look at all the bridal photos in your family at one time? Use the keyword “Wedding” or “Brides”, for instance.

Copyright Details: Who owns the legal rights to the image or who took/owns the picture? For example, you’d use this field for documents downloaded from Ancestry.com or the name of the professional photographer who took a photo of your family.

What metadata fields do you think you’d use most often?

The post What is Metadata? appeared first on Maureen Taylor.