Quote from: biglime5590 on June 02, 2025, 05:33:37 AMHello IMatch Community,
I'm a new IMatch user (and new Mini PC owner, specifically for IMatch as a Mac user!) and am incredibly impressed with its depth after just a few hours. I'm looking for guidance on tackling a large project: ~10,000 scanned family photos, currently with zero metadata.
My goal is to comprehensively tag each photo with keywords, locations, events, descriptions, and people.
I. Overall Workflow & Batch Processing Strategy:
I'm aiming for maximum efficiency. The Face Recognition tool is already proving very effective for "low-hanging fruit."II. AI Autotagger (via Variables & External AI - e.g., Gemini Flash):
- Phased vs. Per-Photo Approach:
- Would you recommend a phased approach (e.g., Pass 1: All faces; Pass 2: Locations/Events; Pass 3: Keywords/Descriptions)?
- Or, is it more efficient to process each photo completely in one go?
- Handling Disorganized Scans: My scans are completely unsorted. Photos from the same event might be thousands of images apart.
- What IMatch features or strategies (e.g., Collections, Stacks, Timeline use, specific batch processing) are best for grouping these scattered event photos as I discover them?
- Are there particular "first pass" metadata fields (e.g., rough dates, initial event guesses) that make subsequent, more detailed tagging easier within IMatch?
- Adding "Year Taken" Information: Many photos will only have an estimated year.
- What's the recommended IMatch workflow for adding an approximate year to each photo?
- Should I, for example, create a custom tag for "Estimated Year," populate that, and then use a tool like TimeWiz to batch apply this to the appropriate EXIF/IPTC date fields? Or is there a more direct method?
- AI for Date Estimation:
- Is there any existing or potential workflow (perhaps involving scripting or external tools integrated with IMatch) where AI could assist in guessing a photo's date? For instance, if IMatch knows the people in the photo and their birthdates, could AI leverage this to estimate an age for the subjects and thus a likely year for the photo?
- General Setup: Any other IMatch setup tips or considerations for a project of this scale to ensure success and avoid rework?
I've successfully used person variables to feed AI prompts for descriptions, which is amazing! However, I've encountered an issue:Thanks so much for any guidance you can offer.
- Action Misattribution: The AI (Gemini Flash) often knows who is in the photo (from the variables) but arbitrarily assigns actions to the wrong person (e.g., says "Ben is on the swing" when it was Jim, even if Ted was also present).
- Feeding Face Region Data to AI:
- Is there a way within IMatch, or a known workflow, to provide the AI with face region data (i.e., bounding boxes/coordinates for each recognized person) alongside the names? This could potentially allow the AI to correctly associate actions with the specific individuals performing them.
- Maybe I could export versions of photos with face annotations burned in, have the AI process those, and then somehow map the generated metadata back to the originals using IMatch's stacking or versioning features? Or is there a more integrated solution?
- Alternative AI Prompting/Tools: Are there other IMatch features or prompting strategies I should explore to improve the accuracy of AI-generated descriptions, especially regarding who is doing what? Or any other ideas of how to use AI to make this whole process easier?
Quote from: sybersitizen on June 14, 2025, 05:00:59 PMAs indicated, I won't be on Win10 much longer anyway, so I'll see how things go with Win11.D-500 files work here just fine, with only the standard WIC codecs installed. Should work for you too.
Quote from: Mario on June 13, 2025, 02:58:58 PMAutoTagger needs an API key. Not sure that kind of "Alias" you have created. Restricting an API key to specific APIs is always advisable and usually automatic. Google requires you to select for what you want to use an API key. Unless you enable the correct API, nothing will work. As documented in Google Maps API Key and for Gemini they activate generativelanguage.googleapis.com, I believe.
Since the API key must be accessible to IMatch, everybody that can access your computer and start IMatch can fetch your API keys. No protection against that.
In "normal" projects the API key is stored on a server, and the server accesses Google services. In this scenario you can secure the API key via the static IP address of the server oQuote from: rolandgifford on June 13, 2025, 04:11:01 PMr server farm.Quote from: Mario on June 13, 2025, 02:58:58 PMSince the API key must be accessible to IMatch, everybody that can access your computer and start IMatch can fetch your API keys. No protection against that.
...
This cannot work if you use the API key from a desktop application on a computer which gets a dynamic IP address assigned every day or more often. Only few "private" persons have static IP addresses. But when you have one, you can use it to lock the Google API key to your computer.
Partly correct. Google offer the alternative to a static IP address restriction to be a restriction of requests from a particular browser origin. Therefore if IMatch always requests from *.phototools.com (or whatever) the key can be restricted to calls from that address. As IMatch is effectively requesting from a browser page, knowing that browser ID would allow us to add this restriction.QuoteUnfortunately Google does not support a hard limit, e.g. if 10$ are used, block API access until next month or until I unlock. This would be the best solution.
They used to provide a hard limit with the old charging method and $200 per month free. There was a daily warning limit that didn't interfere with usage and a monthly limit which blocked requests. I have changed my workflow since the effective reduction in the free usage but will have another look.
This cannot work if you use the API key from a desktop application on a computer which gets a dynamic IP address assigned every day or more often. Only few "private" persons have static IP addresses. But when you have one, you can use it to lock the Google API key to your computer.
A bit of overkill, though.
Only you know your API key. You can change it when you want (and update it in IMatch accordingly). Configure Google to send emails to at least two of your email addresses when your budget is exceeded, s a warning in case you somehow "lose" your API key.
Unfortunately Google does not support a hard limit, e.g. if 10$ are used, block API access until next month or until I unlock. This would be the best solution.
QuoteEarlier many have tried but given up when realizing how much time and efforts it used to take.Small libraries and companies with large unannotated image archives now have a hood change, using AI to describe and tag stuff. Big AI companies support fine-tuning of models for specific purposes or to add "company know-how" for the AI to learn from, even specific vocabularies and terms can be incorporated.
Quote from: Stenis on June 14, 2025, 12:00:50 AM. Today it is a "non-issue".Yes. Unless one has very specific requirements for keywords or descriptions, we can leave that boring job to AutoTagger.