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<body dir="ltr">While not dismissing out of hand some possible role of AI assistance here, perhaps like avoiding irretrievably over/underexposed or utterly blurred photos. <br>And while guardedly seeing some potential in what you suggest, and not wanting to dismiss it out of hand, there are I believe deeper directional changes and developments to be explored.<br><br>What you raise here Bryan is going to become an ongoing paradigm question for humans in many realms—which I hope we are going to be aware and wise to quickly.<br><br>Just because it appears “we can”, should we?<br><br>Beauty is in the eye of the beholder – or actually the brain and heart behind the eye. Can AI which itself does not actually 'think', through extrapolating LLMs through rule based criteria, behold and select what humans (or a select group of humans) perceive as beautiful, interesting, and pertinent etc.?<br><br>Where is the barrier between human choice, recognition abilities, and thinking verses artificial machine so-called “thinking”?<br><br>When are we just slipping into letting AI ersatz and do our own thinking for us? <br><br>Would we notice the transition?<br><br>There are already programmes to assist those (mostly young people) who have become *so* glued to and reliant on asking for electronic answers on everything, that they can barely hold fluent conversations with humans, or put two thoughts coherently together.<br><br>Can we realise when we have crossed over into doing no actual thinking, nor making any distinct personal contribution to our AI assisted, or as time goes by — “AI governed” ventures?<br><br>Would others start to even unconsciously suspect a vanilla or bland or even automated approach to the selections they believe we are artistically presenting to them?<br><br>‘and certainly wouldn't replace human-centric selection of the perfect pose and expression’,<br><br>– Paradox –<br><br>‘... knowing they capture the gist of a folder.’<br><br>It becomes a kind of blind 'trust' or 'faith' that AI does the same, or better, job that we would do ourselves – especially in areas of discernment, insight and qualitative appreciation.<br><br>Other than by blind trust, we wouldn't “know” that the AI selection captured the “gist”, if it has done ALL the selection; and to “save hours of manual labor” — we never even appreciatively look at largest thumbnails of each folders’ contents?<br><br>Where then is the “flair” that people have come to associate with your personal choices?<br>— Shall we call it the peculiarly personal human element? Even the things that come from your heart—touching upon the spiritual side of human existence, that “artificial” – can not approach?<br><br>In auto preparing, using AI and coming to avoid hours of manual labour —<br><br>“.. they could just be copied directly to a slideshow, photo frame, or email, knowing they capture the gist of a folder”<br><br>— Could culturally dodgy or dangerously offensive results just slip through “copied directly”?<br><br>And at what future point does actual human review dwindle into abayence?...<br>“Ideally, Highlight photos could be selected to be further manually tagged, starred, labelled, or otherwise entered into existing workflows.”<br><br>If AI does all of the preselection of what even makes it before human eyes to be “further manually tagged, starred, labelled, or otherwise entered into existing workflows” – what is left behind and never seen—and is effectively lost?<br><br>All of the use of AI for bulk processing and preselection assumes that it (though not able to actually “think” or “appreciate”) – it is doing the same job as a human artist would do in assessing available material.<br><br>So ought we at all, inadvertently or otherwise, develop a blind trust or “faith” in artificial powered ‘non-thinking’ — in any human creative or “life” area?<br><br>Given that some now actually worship and dangerously(!) literally receive serious life counsel at the feet of AI “god” interfaces(!)<br>—then even small steps of AI adoption and adaptations must be strenuously evaluated to see where they inadvertently, or otherwise, take us. <br><br>We must not passively drift.<br><br>I look wider than you have proposed — believing we must become very vigilant as to where “artificial” is taking us in our genuine human expression, experience and indeed very existance.<br><br>Paul<hr><a href="https://PaulANorman.info">https://PaulANorman.info</a><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 1 January 2025 11:47:56 am NZDT, "bryan@gillson.net" <bryan@gillson.net> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
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Has the team considered using OpenCV for more than facial/object recognition given the recent improvements to the AI pipelines in 8.5/8.6 (thank you Mike!)? </div>
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I'm hoping for something similar to iPhoto's auto-generated highlight reels where DigiKam would identify a quick-and-dirty "good enough" sampling and representation of the contents of a folder. This would save hours of manual labor: Just selecting vacation
highlights can be incredibly time consuming and intimidating when the folder contains well over 1,000 photos from my wife, children, and I with many overlapping subjects, duplicates, errant or "failed experiment" photos, etc.</div>
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These Highlights don't need to be some Platonic ideal "best" photos (whatever that means), and certainly wouldn't replace human-centric selection of the perfect pose and expression. However, qualitatively decent pictures could be selected using AI-based criteria
such as focus/sharpness, visual clutter, uniqueness, and rule of thirds composition. I don't need 100 elephant pictures from the zoo; just pick a few good ones. Just pick one of the 6 group pictures (even if someone's eyes are closed, I can always refine it
later). Skip the 15 pictures taken of the inside of my pocket. Et cetera.</div>
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Ideally, Highlight photos could be selected to be further manually tagged, starred, labelled, or otherwise entered into existing workflows. Or, they could just be copied directly to a slideshow, photo frame, or email, knowing they capture the gist of a folder.</div>
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Would others find such a feature useful? Or is <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
DigiKam already capable of something like this and I'm just not aware of it?</span></div>
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Thanks!</div>
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