Present & Accounted For

You know, Sarah, when you first recommended the Picasa program to me, I was reluctant (at best). I already had a couple of freeware programs on my computer at the time, and they worked just fine for me, and have ever I mentioned how much I loathe learning new programs? But you talked it up, and I value your opinion, and thus finally agreed to give it a spin.

Oh, how grateful I am that I listened to you! Picasa really is a lovely photo program. I mean, there are a few things about it that I would change, and some functions I would add (in a prefect world, I would simply purchase PhotoShop, and that would be that, but anyway...), but for a go-to place to quickly view and process my myriad of photos, Google's freeware Picasa is it!

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, I got a little notice from Google letting me know there were updates available for Picasa. Of course I installed them, because I'm all about the ongoing process of perfection. The next time I opened the program to tinker with some pictures, a little window opened to explain the face recognition/tagging addition. It looked like a neat feature, since I had just recently spent a lot of time looking for a particular photo. It made sense that if I had all my photographs tagged, finding one would be a lot easier.

So, I tagged a couple of pictures from last month. And Picasa pulled up a bunch more faces that it thought looked like the people I had tagged. And it was right! That face-recognition stuff has leaped right out of the espionage action thriller and landed right on my PC desktop! So I tagged those ones. And Picasa suggested some more.

Before I knew it, I had been tagging pictures for over an hour. That's when I glanced at the "unnamed" catagory, and saw the number 24,653. Yup, over twenty-four thousand untagged faces that Picasa recognized as faces. Which is when my undiagnosed OCD kicked in. I just couldn't handle knowing that there were twenty-four thousand untagged faces, sitting there, waiting to be tagged and organized and put in order. Time to do some virtual housekeeping! I got down to business.

Can I just say that I have way too many pictures stored on this lil' ol' CPU of mine? And as I was tagging and tagging and tagging along, I noticed that there were some photo files copied several different times. A-ha! said my brain. If I can tag all of these, then I can delete the duplicates with impunity, and clean up my hard drive without fear of losing important pictures (which is the mindset that has lead to having a bajillion pictures in the first place...)

Therefor, my project for the past couple of weeks has been to tag all 24,000+ faces, and then eliminate all duplicate files. After many long (but fun!) hours of combing through every last snapshot (and it has been fun, because it's been such a memory lane road trip!), I'm down to less than 700 untagged faces. I hope to finish up today, so I can start purging the duplicates.

Just to bore you with the numbers, (and create a sense of the scope of this project) I have 1,592 tags of Hyrum, 1,859 tags of Gabriella, 1,628 of Lucy, 1,277 of Eliza, 1,184 of Yvette, and 509 tags for my little Georgie-Porgie. There is a combined 1,858 tags for Mark and I, and almost 5,000 for our both of our siblings...without counting in-laws, nieces or nephews, or even our parents! And I have dozens and dozens of family history photographs scanned and saved.

My children have also gotten in on the tagging fun. Hyrum and Gabba have both plopped down at random to taggity-tag-tag away. We have all been endlessly amused at some of the tagging suggestions Picasa has come up with. Baby Amber and Baby Lucy and Baby George have all been suggested interchangeably. And our various Pipkin and Galbraith cousins have been recognized as looking like well, their cousins. The photos of our grandparents in their youth and childhood have been suggested as the current youth and children in the families. And I'll-Be-Darned but if Picasa isn't right: they sure do look alike!

Even more fun is the tagging suggestions for pictures of pictures in the background - hanging on walls, posted on fridges, doodled on notebooks - or of the statues we all seem to have a propensity to pose around for candid portraits. I have "ignored" statues of Louis & Clark, Abraham Lincoln, and a funny little construction dude from a mall play area. Not to mention dolls, t-shirt graphic designs, murals, and leaves on trees that yes-indeed-! looked like a face, once you looked at it.

But the most interesting "face" that kept cropping up was Jesus Christ. Yup. He was in a lot of pictures. I did not create a tag album for him, it didn't feel respectful (I didn't create a tag album for Santa Claus, either, but for completely different reasons). But after the first dozen or so, I started to think about it. I love that my families have pictures and statues of Christ posted all over their houses. I love that we've been lots of places where we took pictures of our children in front of statues of Christ. Once I saw a hang-this-in-your-house inspirational signboard that said:

Christ is the center of our home,
a guest at every meal,
a silent listener to every conversation.

As I have spent the last two weeks going through all these pictures, this quote kept coming back to my mind. I would like to have it in my home somewhere at some point. But in the mean time, it is a great comfort to me to know that Christ already is the center of our homes, and of our vast, extended family.