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A screen shot of the comprehensive IMatch Help System.

The IMatch Help System

The comprehensive IMatch Help System is available online. It is constantly enhanced and updated.

You can reach it from inside IMatch by pressing the F1 key or clicking the Help button available in IMatch dialog boxes.
This is context-sensitive, IMatch opens the best matching topic from the Help System for the current situation.

You can bookmark the Help System entry page or create a couple of bookmarks in your web browser for topics you want to access quickly.

If English is not your native language, your web browser can automatically translate the content of the Help System into your language. See the documentation of your browser for more information.

The built-in printing or Print to PDF function in your browser allows you to download or print selected pages for quick reference.

A screen shot of the comprehensive IMatch Help System.

Running the photools.com System Information Utility.

The photools.com System Information Utility

What is This?

IMatch 2020 and IMatch Anywhere™ 2019.11.2 and later include advanced AI-based technology.
To support this, our products require that the processors in your computer support a technology called AVX (Advanced Vector Instructions). This technology is standard in virtually all processors manufactured since 2011. Only very low-end computers or special computers like stick PC’s, Set-top boxes and similar may use processors without this required feature. You cannot run our software on these computers. It will just crash.

Note: For IMatch Anywhere we will provide special versions of our products for a limited time as a courtesy. See the customer portal for more information.

Is Your Computer Compatible?

You can test your computer with this free utility to see if the processor supports AVX.

Download the Utility

Please download the latest version of the photools.com System Information Utility.

Download the file to a known folder on your system, for example into the Windows Download folder.
Open this folder in Windows Explorer afterwards.

Extract and Run

The downloaded file is namedptc-sysinfo.zip and you must extract its contents before you can run it.
Right-click on the file in Windows Explorer and choose Extract from the context menu. This gives you a file named ptc-sysinfo.exe in the same folder.

Hold down the Shift key and right-click onptc-sysinfo.exe. From the menu, choose the Copy as path command. This copies the fully-qualified file name of the file into the Windows clipboard.

Image showing the download folder.

Open a Command Prompt

From the Windows START menu, open a command prompt window. Press Windows Key + S and search for cmd. Then select the Command Prompt App from the result list.

Opening a command prompt

Run the Utility

Right-click into the window that now opens. This pastes the name of the ptc-sysinfo.exe application into the console window. Press Enter on your keyboard.

Running the photools.com System Information Utility.

The Results

The important information is the support for AVX, which is required to run IMatch 2020.

AVX is a technology that has been introduced in 2011 for both Intel and AMD processors. See this Wikipedia Article for more information.

If your computer has a processor produced before 2011 or it uses one of the rare processors without AVX, you cannot run IMatch 2020 or IMatch Anywhere 1019.11.2 or later on that computer.

Using Google Picasa™ Face Tags in IMatch

[icon_text icon=”Warning” link=””] This article is for an older version of IMatch.
Since version 2020 IMatch includes AI-powered face detection technology and powerful features for managing people.
See People and Face Recognition in the IMatch help system for more information.[/icon_text]

Viewing, using and editing face tags created in Google Picasa or Adobe Lightroom is easy in IMatch.

When importing files, IMatch extracts face annotations created by these products from the XMP record and converts them into IMatch Face Annotations. When writing metadata, IMatch converts Face Annotations back into XMP regions automatically. This fully integrates faces into the powerful IMatch Annotations concept, while ensuring compatibility with all applications that support XMP face regions.

Face Annotations in IMatch

The digital asset management system IMatch 5 contains a face detection feature in the Viewer which works in conjunction with the unique IMatch 5 Face Annotations. With a single mouse-click you let IMatch 5 detect all faces in an image and then you tag these faces with a name. IMatch optionally converts this face tag into a hierarchical keyword. Working with Face Annotations in the Viewer is easy, and fast.

In addition, IMatch supports XMP face regions created by other applications. Since IMatch handles the conversion between simple XMP face regions and IMatch Face Annotations automatically, you don’t need to do anything – it just works seamlessly.

Working with Face Annotations in the IMatch Viewer. Click for a larger view.

Face Tags in Google Picasa™

Picasa is an entry-level image cataloging software from Google. The most notable feature of Picasa is that it employs the very advanced face recognition technology developed by Google.

IMatch can import face tags created in Picasa. If enabled, IMatch automatically converts face annotations into IMatch annotations, and the name tags into hierarchical keywords. It also maintains dedicated collections for images with face annotations, which makes it very easy to find and see all files with one or more persons.

Configuring Picasa

You need to configure Picasa to store face annotations in the XMP metadata inside the image file (Picasa only supports this for JPEG files at this time). Otherwise the data is only stored in the proprietary Picasa database and not accessible for other applications.

For recent Picasa versions, the corresponding option is available under Tools  > Options:

Picasa Options
Configure Picasa to store face annotations and tags in the image file.

Configuring IMatch

IMatch offers a number of options which allow you to control if you want to import face tags from Picasa and how to treat the tags assigned to these faces. You find these options under Edit > Preferences > Metadata. Press <F1> when the dialog is open to display the corresponding help topic with detailed information.

IMatch Face Annotation Options
IMatch Face Annotation Options.

[icon_text icon=”Warning” link=””]IMatch 2020 and later don’t directly import XMP face region tags into keywords. Instead, you can add any number of keywords to a person. And IMatch then ensures that the keywords are added to all files containing that person. See Person Keywords in the IMatch help for more information.[/icon_text]

 

 

Result

If you tag faces in Google Picasa and save these changes afterwards, IMatch imports the face information automatically and displays them as annotations in the Viewer. Face tags created and written by IMatch are also visible in Picasa.

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An image file with face tags in Google Picasa™

The same image in the IMatch Viewer:

Adobe Lightroom™

Recent versions of Adobe Lightroom also store face tags into XMP, using the format recommended by the Metadata Working Group. IMatch supports these face tags automatically and converts them into IMatch Face Annotations. You can see and edit them directly in the Viewer. When you make changes to Face Annotations or you create new Face Annotations in IMatch, they will be saved to the XMP record associated with the image file.  Lightroom then picks them up automatically when you let it reload the metadata.

 Summary

By enabling face tag import in IMatch 5, you can reuse existing face tags created in Google Picasa or other software. The only requirement is that these applications have to support the standard XMP metadata face annotation format, as defined by the Metadata Working Group.

IMatch converts the simple name tag added in Picasa into a proper hierarchical keywords and even allows you to specify where in your keyword hierarchy to import face keywords. The dedicated collections maintained for images with face annotations allow you to find images showing specific persons with a single mouse click.

Since IMatch also supports the face annotations managed by Adobe Lightroom, you have a perfect end-to-end workflow with either application.

How do I get support and help for IMatch?

The primary support forum for IMatch is the photools.community. In this community thousands of IMatch users from over 60 countries discuss all IMatch 5 and DAM related topics. If you cannot find an answer using the search function, post a question. Usually you’ll get a qualified response within a couple of hours.

You can also reach photools.com via Facebook, Twitter and email. Please see the Support & Contact section here on the web site for full details.

The IMatch FAQ

The IMatch FAQ, Workflow and Tutorials section in the photools.community holds many articles and know-how topics.

The IMatch Know-how Archive

Detailed articles about various aspects of image management and processing with IMatch can be found in the IMatch know-how archive.