You’ve all seen those really smart cameras that can tell when someone is smiling -right? Even Google Image Search now allows you to search by color choices, faces, and clip-art criteria. But, what about searching through your personnel collection of thousands of photos? How can you find that “one photo” you remember the details of but… not what you called it or where you saved it inside your computer? PHOTOLOGY to the rescue!
This program is nothing short of amazing… and completely free! You can, literally, “set this software loose” on your computer and it will instantly go to work analyzing your photos in ways that none of your other graphic indexing program have done before. If you are an educator, like me, that has thousands of digital pictures (or anyone else that has thousands of photos on their computers), this new piece of software will take hours off of the time it takes you to sort and find the “right” pictures.
Here are some of the ways that it can “filter” your photo searches:
- Time of Day and Date
- Orientation (portrait, landscape, etc.)
- Over/under exposed
- Taken inside or outside
- Able to search text of captions, file names, folders, etc.
- Coarse or Fine Color Search
- By photo content: Plants, Sky, Faces, Beach, Flowers, Snow, Sunset, Water
- Any combinations of the above
Also, it includes basic photo editing features:
- Contrast options
- Brightness options
- Color options
- Red-eye reduction/removal
- Croping
- Rotate functions
Photology also features a pretty amazing set of Web 2.0 integrations including the abilities to share your photos via Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, and others. In addition, there are various printing functions available that include multi-photo per sheet presets.
I’ve never seen anything like this available as freeware and I am astounded at the searching possibilities the software provides. It is a great tool, especially for educators that use heavily integrate multi-media integration as a part of their teaching style(s). This software is truly an amazing piece of engineering and, in this world of “unlimited digital photography”, it could not have appeared at a better time… photographic organization and indexing has finally “come of age” with this product!
A few caveats:
It is only available for PCs (Mac version may be coming in the near future). You will also need to have Microsoft Net Framework 3.0 installed. In addition, you should have a fairly decent computer as far as RAM, CPU, and Hard Drive space are concerned. Just like any other indexing program (or anti-virus software currently “scanning”), using your computer while Photology is “indexing” may cause your computer to “slow-down”, especially if it is at the low-end of the recommend system requirements. Let me know if you are using and loving this program as much as I am. Enjoy!
Download and find out more about Photology by clicking here.
Joe- I recently got a digital camera; this may come in great handy once I have a photo library established!
P.S. did you disable Disqus on MusTech.net?
-Andy
Joe, I just got a digital camera, so hopefully this will be very helpful once I have established a decent-sized photo library!