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?