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[Sapagrino]

I've been playing around separately with creating photo albums of family members of a given age.  So, I have an album of "5-yr olds" where I can see what all of me, my children, their grandparents, etc. looked like at the age of 5.  Some of the resemblances are remarkable when you line it up like that.

To date, I've done that fairly manually--taking 5 years from the date of each person's birthdate, and then searching my photos around that time for a nice representation.

1) Once I import all my photos into MC, I know there is a way to see the metadata that includes the date each photo was taken.

2) Facial recognition software through my phone and other software has allowed me to tag the majority of my photos with face data of those appearing.  I'm assuming I'll be able to somehow bring that face data into MC so I know who appears in every photo (even if MC has no facial recognition features itself).

3) Is there any way to essentially input each person's birthdate into the library?

With above, it would certainly be mathematically possible to derive each person's age as they appear in each photo.  That would be just ideal for my purposes, and I could way more easily compile albums spotlighting, say, each of my kids at each age, tossing in a couple other x-year olds in the family, famous people at the same age, etc.  The Expression language and SmartList features in MC seem easily powerful enough for such manipulation of "date of photo", "X-person appears=Yes" field I could create, and a Smartlist that filters on an expression field where the date of photo is, say, between 5 years and 5 yrs/3mos from an appearing person's birthdate; but I would have no idea how to start executing on that.  I'm happy to do more research on my own, but would greatly appreciate any headstarts folks have time to give, or just any other thoughts around the above ideas, and whether what I'm trying to do will in the end be possible.  Thanks!

[Sapagrino]

Bump.  To summarize:

Is there any way to essentially input each person's birthdate into the library, and have MC use that and the date picture taken to compute the person’s age for further filtering?

[marko]

This is a really interesting idea

So... I'm already doing that....


However, the background stuff to achieve that is a bit mental!

It dates back many years, to a time before we had a "Date" data type we could set for our own fields, so the math just wouldn't work.
What I did was to turn the date the photo was taken into a number yyyyMMdd, then use an expression, one for each grandkid, to compare the number with the yyyyMMdd number of their birthdays, and output accordingly. I then have a final expression that puts them all together in a grammatically correct string, depending on how many of them are in a given photo.

As the years roll on, I have to keep expanding the expressions that produce their ages. That in itself is easy enough, and everything else just takes care of itself. If I recall correctly, the age expressions have them taken care of up to the age of 14 to begin with.

It's quite quick to read that, but in effect, MC has to calculate these each time, and when you put it all together, that's one very, very, large expression, and I have a suspicion that it's now causing me slowdown in theater view when browsing the image library. It never used to, but lately, it's gotten quite bad, with a three to five second lag when switching from view to view.

Let me have a think about the 'birthday' field idea, and some experimenting time, and I'll get back to you... bump if I've not posted back by Monday evening... time's tight for me these days

-marko.

[marko]

I think there might be a stumbling block over significant dates (their actual birthdays) and dates when they were babies...

The ladies in my life insist that a baby is never ½ a year old. Babies are days old, then weeks old, then months old, then, finally, years old!

To keep them off my back, all of that is also factored in to my mental expressions
I'm not sure we can find such a quick and easy way around that... we shall see though, you never know

-marko

[~OHM~]

I think there might be a stumbling block over significant dates (their actual birthdays) and dates when they were babies...

The ladies in my life insist that a baby is never ½ a year old. Babies are days old, then weeks old, then months old, then, finally, years old!

To keep them off my back, all of that is also factored in to my mental expressions
I'm not sure we can find such a quick and easy way around that... we shall see though, you never know

-marko

LOL  6mo old is one half a year....but the gals gave birth so it's months.....lol

[Sapagrino]

Completely with you on the days/weeks/months/years thing.   Really like your idea of building it into the photo descriptions.  I want to do it!   .  To date, my thinking around “when is a 5 year old a 5 year old?” has been around searching for nice photos I can add to the “Album of 5-yr olds” versus 4.5 or 5.5yr olds (!! !!).  I have thought more about this than anyone probably should. .

I thought of the following in my first attempt at a structure, but not set in stone:
1. Newborns - 1 day
2. First week - 2 days to 6 days
2. Weeks - 1 to 3 weeks
3. Months - from 1month to 6mos [maybe should go to 11 mos]
4. Half-years - from 1.5 to 8.5 [9.5?]
5. Years - from 1 to whenever

I’m thinking of representative priorities like this:
1. Day of birthday is most representative; then
2. From day after birthday to 1 months after; then
3. From 1 [2?] weeks before birthday to the day before birthday; then
4. From 2 mos after to 10 mos [9?] after; then
5. From 2 mos before to 2 [3?] weeks before.

Ideally, I’d be able to play with the parameters to see when it feels like the almost 5 year old is still really a four and a half year old!  I could probably lay this out in Excel, but no idea how one would execute such complexities in MC.

Or maybe better, I think I want to go with whatever the ladies in your life think 

[marko]

I made a bit of headway on this today. Leveraging Mc's "elapsed" date function, I have an expression returning an "age" from a given date.

That made my head hurt so I'll pick up on it, maybe tomorrow.

I'm not feeling that we'll fully reach our goal though...
Currently, "elapsed" doesn't do weeks and months. It does hours up to 36, then days all the way up to 365, then switches to years.  It also won't go beyond 68 years ago, any more than that, it breaks.
We don't have control over this, the dev team would need to change the code for elapsed for us, and I'm not really thinking that's a reasonable request for our scenario.

Updates will follow, and if I get anywhere useful, I'll post a step by step.

-marko

[marko]

Getting there...
Everything you see in this view except "Date" and "Keywords" is derived from expressions.

In order to get the "Age" pane to filter to ages, I've had to remove the formating, and as I can't get it to not round up, I resorted to just trimming the decimals off the end.

So far, so good then. Next up, is the challenge of forcing the days, weeks and months. That could get messy and convoluted, and, if I find it slows MC down in anyway, I'll just give it up as a bad job... not a bad start though...


-marko

[marko]

Surprised myself... All up and running

Sapagrino,
I am quite a long way from a default MC library here, so these expressions will almost certainly need some tweaking to fit your library.

I'm also not sure how many ages you want to track? I only follow the ages of our four grandchildren here.

My solution requires three library fields per person...
One to hold their birthday
One to work out how old they were by date of photo
One to nicely format the age calculated in the previous field.

Once set up, you only need to enter the birthday dates in that field and everything else will just get worked out.
You can add a "tag on import" rule for your images so that all the 'birthday' dates are automatically tagged on import.
I've set mine up so that even though MC still has to parse every photo, if none of the four grand children are present in the keyword tag, it skips the calculations. I havn't noticed any slow down or lag here, which is nice

With regards to "Do you consider 4 years and 11 months to be 5 years"...
It starts to get insanely complicated the more granular you want to get, so here's where I pitched it, based on what MC's "Elapsed" date was giving me to work with...

• When it's less than a day, MC returns a time... Regardless, I've only kept the hours from that value, even if the minutes were at 59.
• When it's more than a day, but less than than 2.5 days (I think), MC returns hours to one decimal place. I've simply divided that by 24, removing the decimals from the result, with rounding up or down.
• Once into days, MC doesn't switch again until it hits years. If it's less than seven, I kept it at days, rounded up or down. I then made an arbitary decision to keep it to 8 weeks, so, if the days returned are less than 60, I divide by seven, round it up or down, and them's the weeks. If days returned by MC are 60 or more, I divide by 30, round up or down, and call them months.
• MC is returning years to two decimal places. I don't think round years up or down is appropriate here, and as there doesn't seem to be a way to turn off rounding, I used other functions to strip off the decimal and keep the year. This does mean though, that the age does not progress until the birthday is passed.

So far, I'm happy with how this is working. None of the girls have seen what I've been up to yet though ;)



Where do you keep your people tags? In the [People] field? I think that's all I need to know to adjust the expressions. If you let me know three or four of the names you want to track, as they are in your library, I can set it up for you, and you can use that as a template for any more you want to include.


-marko

[Sapagrino]

Wow, this looks amazing. I’ll give it a try this weekend.

As I’m really just starting to organize my photos, any other specific suggestions?  For example, would it be possible to share the keyword scheme you use?  Obviously, not specific people and places, but wondering what sorts of themes, groupings, or other descriptors you use.  I’m thinking some sort of “emotion” descriptors, how sharp/blurry, how private, whether/where shared out, etc.  Maybe nest the person under the descriptor?  The descriptor under the person?  I know one answer is “it depends on what you want to do,” but since I’m still exploring, some examples would really expand and accelerate my thinking.  I’ll do more forum searches too, of course.  Thanks.

[marko]

Hi Sapragrino,

I got your PM...
I'll post the answers in here in case anyone else is following along. Only names will be posted, you'll get the rest from that. Hopefully, you won't regret ever asking

I'm going to assume that you're not familiar with adding library fields, not familiar with configuring auto-import and that your names are stored in the default [People] field

We'll do Rosie in the examples... edit and repeat for everyone else.
You will need three fields for each person's age you wish to track (remembering that using this approach, we can't handle ages over 68 years ago).

I chose to name my fields with an "age" prefix to keep them altogether in the field list, thus making them easier to manage.

=====================================================
Step 1: Create the fields for Rosie.

• Open the field manager at: Tools > Options > Library & Folders > Manage Library Fields.
  Birthday Field
  
• Click the "Add New Field" button.
• Name it "Age-Rosie-Birthday" and click OK.

• Set the "Flags" to just "Image" and the "Data Type" to "Date"

Unformatted 'elapsed' (age) field

• Click the "Add New Field" button.
• Name it "Age-Rosie-Elapsed" and click OK.
• Set the "Flags" to just "Image".
• Near the bottom, choose "Calculated data" and paste the following string into the "Expression" field...

Code: [Select]

ifelse(isequal([People],Rosie,8),formatdate(math(now()-([date,0]-[age-rosie-birthday,0])),elapsed))

Formatted age field

• Click the "Add New Field" button.
• Name it "Age-Rosie" and click OK.
• Set the "Flags" to just "Image".
• Near the bottom, choose "Calculated data" and paste the following string into the "Expression" field...

Code: [Select]

if(isequal([People],Rosie,8),
if(isequal([age-rosie-elapsed],days,8),
ifelse(
isequal([age-rosie-elapsed],7,3),removeright([age-rosie-elapsed],7) Days,
isequal([age-rosie-elapsed],60,3),formatnumber(math(formatnumber([age-rosie-elapsed])//7),0,,Weeks,Week),
!isequal([age-rosie-elapsed],60,3),formatnumber(math(formatnumber([age-rosie-elapsed])//30),0,,Months,Month)),

if(isequal([age-rosie-elapsed],:,8),listitem([age-rosie-elapsed],0,:) Hours,
ifelse(isequal([age-rosie-elapsed],hours,8),formatnumber(math(formatnumber([age-rosie-elapsed])//24),0,,Days,Day),
isequal([age-rosie-elapsed],2,3),removeright(formatnumber(formatdate(math(now()-([date,0]-[age-rosie-birthday,0])),elapsed),2),3) Year,
!isequal([age-rosie-elapsed],2,3),removeright(formatnumber(formatdate(math(now()-([date,0]-[age-rosie-birthday,0])),elapsed),2),3) Years))),)
With those three fields created, OK your way all the way out of 'Options'.

=====================================================
Step 2: Populate and use the fields for Rosie.

• All you need to do now, is input Rosie's birth date into the "Age-Rosie-Birthday" field...
• Use any suitable, existing image view to list all photos of Rosie. Select them all.
• Open the tag window. You will need to add the "Age-Rosie-Birthday" field. Do so by clicking the little icon in the top left of the tag window header. I think the tool is self explanatory.
• Once added, and with all the 'Rosie' photos selected, enter the birth date. If you don't know the time, just enter 1am. I'm not sure where you are in the world, but the important thing here is to enter the date in the same format as used by the system that MC is running on. For me, here in the UK, that would be dd/MM/yyyy hh:mm:ss
  
  =====================================================
  Create a view scheme to play with ages
  If you want to play with something along the lines I posted above, the first three panes are 'expression' based panes, the last would be your "People" field.
  
  If you're not familiar with adding views to your library, here's a guide I posted some time ago for v17 that's still current today...
  https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,68960.0.html
  
  Just remember you're adding a view to the image branch of your library, not audio as described in that guide.
  
  The calculated fields are like so:
  Headcount
  
  Code: [Select]
  if(isempty([People]),No People,ListItem(No People;math(listcount([People])) People;math(listcount([People])) People, math(min(max(listcount([People]), 0),2))))
  Age
  You should be able to see the repitition in this one... If you need more, just copy and insert anywhere inside the sequence.
  
  Code: [Select]
  listbuild(1,;,
ifelse(
isequal([Age-Rosie],hour,8),Hours\[Age-Rosie],
isequal([Age-Rosie],day,8),Days\[Age-Rosie],
isequal([Age-Rosie],week,8),Weeks\[Age-Rosie],
isequal([Age-Rosie],year,8),Years\[Age-Rosie]),
ifelse(
isequal([Age-Jonah],hour,8),Hours\[Age-Jonah],
isequal([Age-Jonah],day,8),Days\[Age-Jonah],
isequal([Age-Jonah],week,8),Weeks\[Age-Jonah],
isequal([Age-Jonah],year,8),Years\[Age-Jonah]),
ifelse(
isequal([Age-Jessi],hour,8),Hours\[Age-Jessi],
isequal([Age-Jessi],day,8),Days\[Age-Jessi],
isequal([Age-Jessi],week,8),Weeks\[Age-Jessi],
isequal([Age-Jessi],year,8),Years\[Age-Jessi]),
ifelse(
isequal([Age-Teresa],hour,8),Hours\[Age-Teresa],
isequal([Age-Teresa],day,8),Days\[Age-Teresa],
isequal([Age-Teresa],week,8),Weeks\[Age-Teresa],
isequal([Age-Teresa],year,8),Years\[Age-Teresa]),
ifelse(
isequal([Age-Eric],hour,8),Hours\[Age-Eric],
isequal([Age-Eric],day,8),Days\[Age-Eric],
isequal([Age-Eric],week,8),Weeks\[Age-Eric],
isequal([Age-Eric],year,8),Years\[Age-Eric]))&datatype=[list]
  Calendar
  
  Code: [Select]
  formatdate([date,0],yyyy\MM\dd,No Date)&datatype=[list]
  ===========================================
  All done, have fun
  
  -marko

[marko]

Actually, I forgot about auto-import, but I'm all out of time now. Just shout if you need a hand with that.

Also, very quickly... the thumbnail text...

Way back when I started all of this, I only had three grandchildren, and was using a long list of "If's" to build a grammatically correct string of text depending upon who was in the photo. This was going to get exponentially more difficult and out of hand if more came along, so, a true gentleman by the name of MrC, wrote a regex string for me that just takes care of it all. You just add another "ifelse" to the chain as required. I have no idea how this works, but it's brilliant...

Code: [Select]

if(regex(listbuild(1,=,ifelse(isequal([People],Rosie,8),Rosie/ aged/ [age-rosie]),ifelse(isequal([people],Jessi,8),Jessi/ aged/ [age-jessie]),ifelse(isequal([People],Jonah,8),Jonah/ aged/ [age-jonah]),ifelse(isequal([People],Eric,8),Eric/ aged/ [age-eric]),ifelse(isequal([People],Teresa/,8),Teresa/ aged/ [age-teresa])),/#^(.+?)(?:=([^=]+))?$#/),listbuild(1, / and/ , replace([R1], =, /,/ ), [R2]), )
-marko

[~OHM~]

off topic but a mention must be made

a true gentleman by the name of MrC

A true gentleman and a scholar....well missed around here! but you Marco and quite a few others have stepped up and for that I thank you and all the others!

[marko]

off topic but a mention must be made

A true gentleman and a scholar....well missed around here! but you Marco and quite a few others have stepped up and for that I thank you and all the others!

Appreciate the nod. We all do our best.

I revisited this over the last couple of days, and have it down to just two fields per person.
I also set up the tag on import rules.
It all 'just works'. Much more efficient and streamlined than my previous approach, although, in my defense, at the time I adopted that, it was the only way to achieve the goal.

Thank you to sapagrino for pushing me to rewrite all of this. I'm very happy with how this is working now.

It probably all looks a bit mad, but once it's set, you can forget it.
Every photo imported gets the birth date tags, then, as soon as you tag a person whose age is tracked against a photo, their age in that photo is calculated automatically. The thing is maintenance free, and will work, without intervention, until they hit 68 years old... then we'll have to bug Matt for an extension

Some notes:
This expression calculates the age at the time of the photo...
ifelse(isequal([People],Name of Person Goes Here,8),formatdate(math(now()-([date,0]-[Birth Date Field Goes Here,0])),elapsed))

When I was putting this together, it was easier to follow what was going on by keeping that in it's own field, and then using the more complex expression to format that first field. You can, of course, nest that inside the formatting field, thus cutting things down to two fields per person. One for the birth date, and one to return the age at a given date and time.

In the "Age" pane expression I presented above, I missed out the months... DOH!

When setting up the auto import rules, you have to use the raw birth date data otherwise it won't work.
You can get this by adding an expression column to a view using the expression =[birth date field,0]
Copy the value returned and paste it in to your auto import rule.

If all of this is too much to comprehend, just say and, if you really want to give it a whirl, we can do it in small steps.
There's a lot of repitition in there, and if you follow a template, once one is working, the rest are all the same, you're just changing the peoples names in the referenced fields.

I used Notepad++ to sort mine out. Using the 'find and replace' function, all four grandkids were done in a matter of minutes.

-marko

[marko]

To date, I've done that fairly manually--taking 5 years from the date of each person's birthdate, and then searching my photos around that time for a nice representation.

This is the final piece of this little project, I think

As it was, the view scheme detailed above didn't make this, the real goal, possible.

My solution was to make the "Age" and "Headcount" panes custom library fields instead of expression based panes.
Then, in the viewscheme setup, under 'set rules for file display', I used...

Code: [Select]

[Media Type]=[image] -[Age]=[] [Head Count]=[1 Person] ~limit=-1,1,[population],[age] ~sort=[Date]
"Population" is my own custom field that I use to pull the people out keywords (don't ask!).
What this does, is limit the list to photos that have an "Age" value, that contain only one person, and limits the list to just one photo of each person per age.

I added age fields for our children too, and although maybe a bit of a novelty view that I've not tried moving to theater view as I can't see it working well there, the results certainly have that "wow" factor when you see pics of the grandkids and their Mum's at the same age, side by side. Refreshing the view produces a new set of photos.

Now, I'm happy because it's all set and working well here, but I'm also accutely aware that whilst everything you need to create the view is present in this thread, it's awfully fragmented, and the expressions are hard to follow.

As I said in my previous post, it's best to get one working, then use a text editor with 'find/replace' to quickly produce the rest.

When you're ready, give a shout here and we can go through it steps at a time to get each area right. The biggest problem for me trying to write it up for you to do at your leisure is that there's too many custom fields involved. I'll have a think about that and, time permitting, I might be able to write it up, highlighting where you have to insert your own field names.

We'll see who posts first

-marko

[Sapagrino]

Hi, marko!

Thanks so much for all of this.  I'm working through it now, and can see it come together before my eyes. 

[I am very much with you regarding MrC.  He was so helpful to me personally, and through all the posts of others.]

To re-summarize the procedure, so far:

0. Buy MC, use it for music and photos, and register for the forum!

1. New User Fields: Age-Name-Birthday, Age-Name-Elapsed, Age-Name
2. input birth date into the "Age-Name-Birthday" field for each photo
3. Add a new Image view with three calculated Expression fields, using the Code you provide below (Sep 3, 10:58am): Headcount, Age, Calendar

I have done 1 and 2 for just Rosie so far, and have the start of the view in 3.  Very happy already!  Not difficult at all.

4. Under the View Header Menu, Thumbnails, Thumbnail Text, paste the thumbnail text Expression from the Code you provide below (September 03, 12:25pm)
5. Under the View Header Menu, Thumbnails, Thumbnail Text Lines, increase # of lines if desired

That’s where I am so far, and I can see the text starting to fill in below the thumbnail in the view.  Is there a separate toggle to get that text to appear when you hover over the picture and the picture expands?

A quick look at your next posts, and quick thoughts before I move along with them:

I revisited this over the last couple of days, and have it down to just two fields per person.

...

When I was putting this together, it was easier to follow what was going on by keeping that in it's own field, and then using the more complex expression to format that first field. You can, of course, nest that inside the formatting field, thus cutting things down to two fields per person. One for the birth date, and one to return the age at a given date and time.

In the "Age" pane expression I presented above, I missed out the months... DOH!

Above is where I’m focusing next but, I’m with you, and prefer to be able to follow what is going on step by step.  Plus, based on my objectives, I need to see the “14.69 years” at times in addition to “14 Years”.

Ultimately, I’d like to track a lot of people, but happy to start small….
Will need to do the tag on import rule
Not overly concerned with speed of import, but good to know little impact
I’ll come back to the granular rules you set out.  It gets insane, I agree, but well worth it to get it right and kind of fun to take it to the extreme! 

Taking a short break, but will come back to this later today.  Very excited about the progress.  Thanks again.

Eric

---------------------------

=====================================================
Step 2: Populate and use the fields for Rosie.

• All you need to do now, is input Rosie's birth date into the "Age-Rosie-Birthday" field...
• Use any suitable, existing image view to list all photos of Rosie. Select them all.

=====================================================

I had to manually tag a few sample photos that were in my Library.  I still need to tackle mining the data from other software libraries that do facial recognition, and which I need to migrate from (iCloud, OneDrive, etc.).  For another post.