Photology is a new program which is designed to let you filter your photos and bring some semblance of organisation to chaos. Fire it up, and it will automatically index all of the images on your hard disk. You can then search for a range of photos based on useful filters like indoors or outdoors, in or out of focus, photos containing flowers, beaches, sunsets, that sort of thing.
It’s a neat idea and potentially extremely useful and I really want to like Photology, honest I do. But it’s difficult. The program is fast enough and the interface is nice and simple, but most of the search criteria deliver such random results that the program is almost unusable at times. I indexed the 10,000 photos on my hard disk, did a search for sunsets, and got back 1665 images of everything from macro product shots, to night time, to underexposed and so on. Useless. A search for snow delivers lots of beach shots and other random stuff. Doing a more complex layered search likewise delivered stuff which wasn’t relevant.
It’s a shame because the premise is good, and to be honest if this was freeware I’d be more forgiving, since searches like colour matching and date seem to work fairly well. But it feels as though the developers rushed this product out, and set a price tag way ahead of themselves. They should have released it as freeware first to tighten up the search algorithms with their user base, then introduced a pro version. As it is I can’t really recommend you go out and spend $39.00 on this product, even though it comes with some basic image editing and sharing features which could be useful, but can be found in freeware elsewhere.
Can’t find the photo of Uncle Ted wearing that orange polka dot tuxedo taken a few years ago at the 4th of July party on the beach? No problem. Your nine trillion gigabyte hard drive is no match for Photology! You know the expression, “finding a needle in a haystack,” right? Thanks to Photology, haystacks of photos will get a lot smaller, making it much easier to find the “needle” you’re looking for – even if that needle is an orange polka dot tuxedo.
