What I Want: A Comprehensive Photo Browser

After watch­ing a demo video of the litl web­book; watch­ing with envy the face recog­ni­tion fea­tures of iPhoto and Picasa; and using Polar Rose, Photo Finder from Face.com, and Cooliris — I real­ized just how much poten­tial there is for a fully-integrated photo brows­ing appli­ca­tion. Either web– or desktop-based, pho­tos could be pulled from your Flickr/Facebook/MySpace/etc. feeds, as well as those of your friends/family/contacts; exist­ing tags would also be imported, and face recog­ni­tion applied; and they would all be pre­sented to you in a pure brows­ing inter­face, where the sources of these pho­tos are hid­den, and you are free to scan through them as part of one big collection.

I tried Flock again — for the tenth time in five years, it seems — think­ing that it prob­a­bly includes some­thing like this. But baf­flingly, it doesn’t. The “Media Bar” has a nice scrolling film strip of pho­tos and videos, but only presents a sin­gle feed at a time. Not to men­tion, of course, that it doesn’t rec­og­nize any tags or faces

The social activ­ity aggre­ga­tors that I have seen are too all-encompassing, pulling in blog posts and sta­tuses on top of pho­tos, most often pre­sent­ing those pho­tos only as tiny thumb­nails until they’re clicked. The guy in that litl video is right when he says that “We’re at the time where there’s the small­est per­cent­age of pho­tos seen to pho­tos taken, because every­one takes pho­tos but they just kind of end up on their com­puter, never to be seen again.” I guess truth­fully I just kind of want to run litl OS in a VirtualBox.

Any­body know of a way to do some­thing like this?