My definition of DAM software is perhaps defined slightly more loosely than others. For me, DAM software is a product that allows you to maintain and find your images, music, fonts, and other digital assets. As a photographer, I tend to focus on managing my digital photo collection and doing things like applying metadata and creating client web galleries. For these actions, I tend to focus on using dedicated photograph management software (such as Idimager or Pro 2) but there are times when you just want to search for (and find) photos that are on your computer… and perhaps you don’t have keywords, tags or ratings already applied to them.

Recently, I needed to find a pink flower photo for a client whose poetry book I was working on. I knew I had attended a flower show a few years back but also knew that these images had not yet been keyworded (I know.. I know!) - I thought this was going to be a slow process for me, browsing for them manually or having to pull them all into my DAM application and exploring for it.

Luckily, I had recently received a message from a software developer who told me about a unique product his team had developed and was wondering if I would like to review it. He mentioned that it used a visual approach to finding images based on things like color and shapes… it sounded like a great idea and would be perfect for helping me to find the image I was looking for. Thus, here is my review of Photology - a unique DAM search tool that lets you find images visually wherever they reside on your system.

Application	Version	Review Date	Price	Review By	Technology
Photology	1.1	July 28, 2008	$19	Andy	PC
Website	http://www.getphotology.com/index.html

General Overview

From their website:

photology helps you navigate the flood of digital photos on your computer by finding photos using simple and intuitive filters like faces, sky, color, location, and time of day. no tags, no folders. it just knows.

The basic premise behind Photology is that users might not want to spend the time tagging, keywording and organizing photos but simply wish to find their photos based on items like color, date and whether the photo was taken during day or outside. In theory, this is a good idea as, in my example above, I was simply looking for a Yellow Flower… Let’s see how the software works.

Installation

The installation of the software was a 2 step process. In the first step, the software checks for and installs the Microsoft .NET framework 3.0 software if it is not presently installed on your system. The software is designed to use this framework in order to work correctly - thus, the software will run only on Windows XP and Vista machines. Unfortunately, installing .NET 3.0 can take upwards of 10 minutes to install on a moderate machine… so the installation of Photology takes a bit longer than I typically like. Vista users already have .NET 3.0 installed so the installation is much much quicker. Here are the screens you will see as you install the product:

On my test PC, this process took 17 minutes to install….! Oh well.. now that I have the program installed, Photology provides you with the opportunity to add folders to the program that it will use to index and monitor:

I only chose to index a single folder that contained around 33 of my review images… however, Photology automatically includes any subfolders you might have as well. It would be nice to have the option to either include or exclude subfolders in the next release.

Success. The installation process was smooth.. but it did take a long time to complete. Given that the majority of the install was because of .NET 3.0, the actual install of the product wasn’t too long. Importing and indexing a single folder of 32 photos took about 1 minute- not bad in my opinion. But, the program was installed and ready to be started.. so here we go!

GUI

As you start Photology up, you are brought to the following screen:

As you can see, the GUI uses a very modern design approach (thx to the .NET 3.0 framework) with very large buttons and a list of thumbnails. Let me breakdown the different sections of the GUI in detail. First, the left menubar:

As you can see from the photo above, the left menubar is the main toolbar you will use that contains the functions you need to control the program. The menu bar functions contain “fly out” menus with additional options depending on which function is chosen. The functions include:

• the left/right arrows which allow you to move between different search criteria and results
• Find by: Time of Day - morning, afternoon, evening, night
• Find by: Date - Month, Year
• Find by: Features - over/under exposed, B&W, in/out of focus, vertical/horizontal orientation
• Find by: Location - inside, outside
• Find by: Content - plants, sky, beach, sunset, flower, snow, faces
• Find by: Text (headline search)
• Find by: Color
• Groups - display user defined groups of photos/collections

Ok.. let’s look at each to see how they do on my sample images.

Searching

The left/right arrows simply let you go back and forth between searches… think of it as a history which is kinda neat. So, if you have run 4 different searches, by going through the left/right arrows you will scroll through each of the results of those searches.

The Search methods seem to be rather hit or miss depending on which you choose. Let’s look at Time of Day for night:

As you can see in the above screenshot, the right side toolbar contains the search criteria chosen from the left toolbar. You can of course combine searches to create more complex criteria - more on that later. In any event, in the above search, I said to find all “night” images. The system found the above photo which had the IPTC Date/Time Original set to 12:00 am.. thus, it was found under night. The other time of day searches all check the Date/Time original field so if that is set correctly, this search works really well.

Let’s move on to the next one.. Date. It uses the same IPTC field so choosing a particular month and year will show you any photos that do exist:

If you click on a thumbnail, the image opens in a full screen viewer where you can view the date/time information:

So far.. so good. I do wish the calendar would highlight the month names in a different color if there are photos that fit that month/year combo. Also, I’m not sure why this wasn’t taken the actual day level.. that, coupled with the coloring of the numbers, would have been very useful indeed.

Ok… Features works by checking the exif flag in the image to see if it is vertical or horizontal orientation.. not much else to say here.

So far, we haven’t really seen anything new.. almost all photo software on the market can do what we’ve seen so far. But, the next 4 searches are what makes photology a unique program - one that works ok with some searches and not so great with others.

Location - indoor vs outdoor. I’m not sure what logic is being used to determine if the photo was taken inside or outside (perhaps looking for the presence of blue towards the top of the photo to represent a sky?) but this was not working well for my sample set. Take the following example set to look for indoor photos:

Hmmm… not exactly inside photos and the one on the left does have a sky present. So - the location search doesn’t really yield the results I would have hoped for. Now, perhaps with a different set of images this might work better - I will need to try it after the review is written and report back if I get better results.

Moving right along…. we come to Content. Now this is really kinda interesting. Content refers to things within the photo or the subject matter of the photo - people, flowers, beach, sky, etc can be detected by choosing the right image. Let’s give this a shot and see how it does:

In this sample search, I chose to find all faces. Well - I didn’t have any portrait photos in my collection but it did find this lovely photo of a water drop! Just to be sure this does work, I did add 3 portrait photos to the mix and I received the following results after import:

So.. indeed, it did work just fine. Sure, it found a false positive.. but it did locate the 3 other “face” photos sucessfully. Nice so far!

The next search I did was to look for water:

Well.. it was a mixed bag here. It did find all the photos in the set that had water of some sort.. but it included some weird ones as well like the Cat photo and the pine needles. Looks like it is trying to match color (blue) to portray water… Just for kicks, I thought I would add in another search for sky to thus look for water and sky:

Hmm… as you can see, it dropped off 5 photos.. but left on a few strange ones still.. like the birds nest and again… meow! So, your millage will certainly vary with the searches under Content.

The next search, text, looks for descriptions that you add to the photo and store in the database:

As you see above, I searched on the word moss and the system was able to locate the correct photo as I had assigned this same word to the image using the description tag in the image viewer earlier. This is another big disappointment in the current version. It would have been a huge asset if the program could actually read all the IPTC data into the database if indeed it does exist and further their search to include this data. As this stands, it is not very useful - those who are going to add descriptions to the database might as well just use a dedicated DAM program and add keywords which are a) must more standard and reliable and b) can be carried along with each image.

Finally, there is the color search which is probably the one that most folks would use to locate a photo in this method:

As you can see, both searches provided very good results for the 2 color searches - while to eye they might not match 100%, it is a very close representation and thus a very nice way to find photos in the system based on color choice.

So.. that’s about all for searching. In general, the software does an admirable job in finding your images based on color, date and time with somewhat mixed results based on content and location. The text find feature is only useful if you are going to add descriptions to the images via Photology which I find rather disappointing and kinda defeats the purpose of the program.

The searches are all done quite fast and results are available in the history to review at anytime.

Kitchen Sink

Given there really isn’t any metadata handling or support in the program - that’s not it’s goal after all - lets move right along through the other features that are included in the software.

Image Viewer

As we saw before, when you click a thumbnail, a larger photo will appear in an image viewer:

From the image viewer, you are able to do a variety of functions which include: enter a caption, view the original date/time or the photo and the folder path and image name. If you click the icon next to the image name, you will be taken to the folder via the windows explorer. If you click the i button next to the original date and time, you can see some minor image information:

Once again, it would be nice to see more exif, ITPC and XMP information about the image here - it is easy to read from the file and could be easily displayed on this screen.

At the bottom of the screen appears a toolbar with the following functions:

• Group: allows you to add the photo to the currently selected group thus adding it to a collection
• Share: a flyout menu will appear:

• and you will be able to choose how you wish to share the image - flickr, picasa, smugmug or by the web or zip file. If you choose to share the file over the web, the file will automatically be zipped and uploaded to a private server (amazon share), you will be provided a web address to the file which you can share with someone else. The files are automatically deleted from the server every 7 days so that makes this an easy way to share images.
• Print: allows you to print you images either by itself or in a package with multiple images per page:

• you don’t have much control over what sizes to print the files at except via your normal print driver.
• Wallpaper: You can set the current desktop wallpaper to the image being displayed.
• Adjust: You can apply basic image adjustment to the photo - crop, color, rotate and redeye:

• Delete: finally, you can delete you image from the system.

So, you can basically do a bunch of things via the image viewer. I especially like the web share feature which makes it easy to share images via the web. It doesn’t appear as though the images are modified in any way though so beware if you are sending high quality originals as they will be exact duplicates.

Groups

Groups is another decent feature that is part of Photology. You can think of groups as collections of photos built from simple or complex searches - in that way, they are basically saved searches. Let’s take a look at an example I built:

In the screenshot above, I built 2 unique groups based on search results - green photos and yellow photos. By clicking the Groups button on the bottom left toolbar, the groups panel will open and display any saved groups you have. You can create a new group by clicking the New Group button which will then allow you to provide a name for the group. groups can be renamed at anytime by clicking the name and entering the new one. To view a group of photos, just click the group and those photos will display as follows:

This group view allows you to create a slideshow from the photos, share or print them. The slideshow option will just start a slideshow of these images on your screen with some very basic control options:

Of course you have stop, play and pause buttons as well as speed control “dots”.. slow, normal and fast to control how fast each slide moves… Thankfully, those MASSIVE buttons go away as soon as you stop moving the mouse… but I’m surprised you can’t do more with this like save the slideshow to a windows exectable or screensaver format, etc.

And that’s it.. in a nutshell, the software is for finding images and the extras it provides are all centered around doing just that.

Conclusion

Photology is indeed a unique program. It shines in some spots while it provides moderate results in others. What do I think? I think it has a place for some folks who don’t want to keyword or organize their images. If you just want to point the program to an hard drive, allow it to index all images it can find and then search for images by date/time or color - this program will serve you fine. For anyone that tags their images already with keywords or wants to do more with IPTC data, unfortunately, this isn’t for you.

I think the technology behind photology could be quite useful in a fully featured DAM product. The combination of color and image recognition along with full support for IPTC/XMP would be a welcome addition. Tools like IMatch already have very decent image recognition search algorithms but are not presented with the nice GUI that photology has - it really allows anyone to perform complex searches easily and quickly.

So - there you have it… at only $19 for a license, it certainly is approachable to folks just looking for a unique way to search for images - I encourage enoetic (publisher) to perhaps explore taking the next version a bit further into the DAM application market.

Oh and in the end… it did help me locate a wonderful pink flower that I used for the cover of the poetry book.. mission accomplished!