Coming from Google Picasa. What I like, what I'd like to see

Tony

I committed and purchased the licence for TonFotos to support its development, it seems a good alternative upgrade to Google Picasa. Picasa still mostly runs fine on my laptop, face recognition works fine, mostly, and cataloguing my photos works well. I’m looking for more functionality in searching for and organizing my photos. I’ll keep updating here as I find out more about TonFotos and add my feature suggestions for discussion.

What I like so far

Face recognition seems to import the database from Picasa, I haven’t had to enter any new names yet and the face recognition accuracy in TonFotos is good
Face recognition suggestions are good and many times is the correct other person. Picasa did not have this.
It’s really nice to have map location functionality back, Google Maps was disconnected from Picasa. And to be able to see a map and quickly find photos I took at that location.
Import of albums from Picasa. Nice, I wasn’t expecting that. What else is imported from Picasa?

Behavior

TonFotos freezes up on my after a few hours open. Currently it’s still scanning my almost 100,000 photos and when I come back to the laptop, TonFotos has frozen and is non-responsive to the mouse. I can close the app by clicking X in the top right corner and there is no "TonFotos has stopped working, do you want to wait?'
-Face recognition and assigning names to batches of photos hangs and lags. For instance when assigning names, scrolling through the names has lag of 5 seconds before scrolling moves, another 5 seconds to scroll again. It can take 15 seconds for right click menu to appear, or longer (TonFotos not responding or wait for program to respond). If I change to another name, it takes 8 seconds to move to another name. I have 32 GB RAM and NVIDIA CUDA card in the laptop too.

What would be nice

Already discussed: sort by photo date and group by dates (by day would be preferred, month would be second choice). Option to sort in ascending, or preferred, in descending order so newest at top. Also This has been discussed already.
Captions like in Picasa and always visible (without needing to hover over photo)
Option to have filenames always visible (without having to hover over photo to see it).
Haven’t found it yet, some file management tools like select series of photos and rename with auto numbering, e.g., “dinner party -1”, “dinner party - 2” etc. where numbers are added sequentially to “dinner party”. And if additional photos are added that numbering carries on from the last number without an error “duplicate filename”. Picasa does this, carries on numbering sequence if the root filename is already in use.
Ability to change width of folder list on left side of TonFotos screen to accommodate long folder names
Drag and drop to assign people/faces to names. (There is Merge names, maybe this will do it too)

Lower priority for me

Photo editing tools. Cellphones do a pretty good job these days with exposure and contrast that the photos are quite usable from the phone. When sending photos the social media apps such as WhatsApp have photo cropping which do fine. For more detailed work, I’ll use dedicated photo editing software. Mostly I’m sharing photos informally and quickly. However, I haven’t edited photos for printing or publication in years.

Andrey

Tony Thank you very much for detailed comparison and review!

I suggest you to wait for scanning to finish before making final conclusions about Tonfotos performance. Initial scan is very laborous process and if your PC in on the weaker side it may be not very comfortable to activaly using application during scan, but when it is finished, it will become much more responsive. The most important factor here is not your RAM, but your HDD speed, since it does a lot of work with its DB.

Only albums and people are imported from Picasa currently. Is there anything else to import?

As to grouping by dates, did you try Events tab? This is exactly its function. You can’t change sort order though.

Tony Captions like in Picasa and always visible (without needing to hover over photo)

Photo captions are always visible. Do you mean people names? I am sure not everyone will agree.

Tony Option to have filenames always visible (without having to hover over photo to see it).

That is design choice. Interface looks much better when those are not always visible.

Tony some file management tools like select series of photos and rename with auto numbering, e.g., “dinner party -1”, “dinner party - 2” etc.

Interestingly enough, we don’t get requests like that very often. Looks like that not that many people need that.

Tony Ability to change width of folder list on left side of TonFotos screen to accommodate long folder names

It is there, hover your mouse over “Photos” title and you will see it.

Tony

Hi Andrey, thanks for your reply and details

Andrey The most important factor here is not your RAM, but your HDD speed, since it does a lot of work with its DB.
Here are the specs for my laptop: i7 1.90 GHz (max 2.11 GHz), 32 GB RAM, 4 TB SSD drive. Windows 11 Pro. NVIDIA Geoforce MX150 with 384 cores.

The initial scanning is slowly getting there. Last night there was “10 hours left” but this morning the program was again “not responding”. On restart, there are “4 hours left”. After freezing up several times today, I’m at “2 hours left”. So maybe today scanning will finish. TonFotos has been scanning for 5 days but not continuously as it becomes unresponsive until I restart it. It may not be frozen entirely, perhaps only not responsive to Windows as I can click and eventually a menu pops up, but it’s a slow process to confirm or re-assign correct names to faces. I have been at it for several days. However, this was also a task in Picasa so not anything particular to TonFotos.

More of what I like

Merge All photos when the name appears two or more times in the People list.
More than one name suggestions and the algorithm is very good
Keyboard shortcuts. I work mainly on the keyboard so the keyboard shortcuts for instance when confirming or assigning names to faces are really good. I don’t waste time going for the mouse then back to the keyboard.

Behavior

Even though I merge photos when the TonFotos generates people with the same name and I Merge All, double or triple names appear again for the same person. I don’t know if this is a hold-over from naming people in Picasa. Once initially scanning finishes I’ll see if this behavior continues or is a one-time start-up issue.

Features/elaboration

I rename almost all the filenames of my photos. Pictures from my cellphone have filenames made up of the code and date and time and some sequential numbers, e.g., PIX-20250108-183215.jpeg. Then for pictures from a particular event I may use File Explorer (or File Rename in Picasa) to File > Rename “John birthday party 08Jan2025” and the software automatically appends a sequential number John birthday party 08Jan2025-1.jpeg, John birthday party 08Jan2025-2.jpeg etc. If I add more photos then the file renaming increments the sequential numbering from where it left off and I don’t have “error, duplicate file name”. Then in searches in the future I just need some key words such as John and birthday to find the photos. I probably won’t remember the date. Unless there are other ways to do this in TonFotos, find photos of an event or of a thing.

However, I can do this is Windows Explorer easily enough. However, it’s a handy feature in Picasa.

Questions

Where do I had photo captions? For instance I’ll take a picture of a receipt then add a caption “Receipt Samsung TV” so I can find the receipt again if I need it. Or use the caption for added information “damage, top left of item”.

Andrey That is design choice. Interface looks much better when those are not always visible.

Can it be a user option to always show the filename near the thumbnail? After re-naming my files

Tony

Andrey It is there, hover your mouse over “Photos” title and you will see it.

I see it. OK, it’s all or nothing, I can’t drag it to a width wide enough to see my entire folder name but conserving as much screen space to view thumbnails. But the current implementation works, I can expand the width when I need it.

2 hours left on the scanning, it’s getting close.

I will read the user manual, perhaps there are new paradigms for finding photos. My need is to find photos of events by date, location, or filename or caption. My use for a photo catalogue is to find and share photos of past events, some from years ago. I won’t remember the date so filename or caption help me find quickly in Picasa. Faces not so much because it can be the same group of people across many events and photos. Location if the location was unique but I have thousands of photos say at home.

I see captions imported from Picasa. How do I edit or add new captions? I can’t seem to find it in TonFotos.

Andrey

Tony I don’t know if this is a hold-over from naming people in Picasa.

This is know issue of Picasa. For some reason it would write same name with several different ID’s into it’s picasa.ini file.

For finding photos, please make sure to check the video on our youtube channel that explains search and filter functions.

Here’s anouncement about captions: https://community.tonfotos.com/d/128-version-130-text-comments-for-images

You approach for naming enents is quite unconventional. Most people use folders for that. You create a folder with descriptive name and move your photos there. This is way easier that adding same name to every photo. People usually edit photo name to mark individual content photo, but I would say that using captions is much more civilized way to achive the same result.

Tony

Thanks for the pointer to the videos, very useful. Is there a list of the keyboard shortcuts? I didn’t realize keyboard shortcuts existed.

Regarding re-naming filenames and photo organization. I organize photos in folders by month. For major events, e.g., “Tony’s birthday 2024” I’ll have it’s own folder. If it’s a trip, the trip will have its own folder and subfolders for friend’s photos so I know which ones are mine and can share and which ones aren’t mine and not mine to share. Bulk re-naming is pretty quick in Picasa or File Explorer, select all > file > rename. And sequential numbers are appended automatically. I can rename hundreds of photos quickly. With comments I have to add them one at a time to photos, I’ll do that if there is something interesting in the photo, say the folder is a trip but there is a series of photos in that folder with an antique car, I’ll add a comment to a few photos with the car so I can find it quickly.

With File Explorer and TonFotos so far I can do what I need. So far so good.

Andrey

Tony Thank you for exlaining your workflow.

As to shortcuts - every toolbar button has a tooltip with its Shortcut, every menu item has its shortcut displayed next to it. We will also add a full list of shortcuts into web documentation once it is ready, we are working on it right now.