Or pretty close to it. I have created a little program that randomly selects a random album from my twenty or so album repositories up on the Internet and presents the viewer with a slide show. To view a new album, just press F5 to refresh with a new album.

Most of the regular readers of this blog will know that I generally use Picasa from Google to manage my photographs. I currently have about 63,000 of my own photographs under management on my computer and a number of these have been uploaded to web albums which is what the slide shows are generated from.

There are a couple of neat things about modern software for managing photos. Firstly, you can embed information or tags to help you and others find the photograph more easily into the photograph. That means a database that is smart enough can look inside the photograph and find out who took it, where it was taken and possibly who is in the photograph. So even if the photograph becomes separated from the album, the information is still embedded in the digital image.

The other neat thing is that Picasa does pretty good face recognition. I have it turned on for about 200 people and not only can I find and group faces, I can create an album containing all photographs with that person in the phot without having to physically copy the photographs to another album.

I guess a final word before the fun bit is privacy and copyright. I am a big fan of "Creative Commons" approach to making copyright more user friendly in a digital world. Check out their website at http://creativecommons.org. I generally permit a free to use for non-commercial purposes (education for example) but with attribution.I do love to hear where my photographs are being used. The other is privacy. With Picasa, I can post pictures to an album that is available to people if I send a link, but cannot be searched using Google. I use these albums for photographs of sport events where Joe is involved such as karate and basketball where it is almost impossible not to have someone else's child in a picture. I want to share those pictures with other parents, but I don't really want to make them available to the whole internet. That is why private albums are good because they permit selective sharing.

Now to the albums... http://www.xsymetrix.com.au/picasaget1.cfm

Joe has a school project on where we are gathering some photographs of his ancestors and family back to great grandparent level. Having scanned photographs with face recognition applied allows us to quickly locate the photographs we want to use.

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