Cool Kodak Technology

I am just back from New York, where Kodak had a little gathering of reporters and analysts to talk about some futuristic technology straight out of movies such as "Minority Report."

Kodak, for instance, is playing around with software that will recognize faces. The application would be able, theoretically, to search all the pictures on your hard drive and pull out every image of you son or daughter, aunt or uncle, mom or dad.

That's all well and good, but what then? Kodak's got software that will automatically organize those images into albums. So, for instance, you could end up this process with an album that tells the story of your family's year in pictures. Or more.

In the future there may be the capacity to analyze the pictures for certain scenes -- grouping indoor and outdoor shots together, for example, or even spotting Christmas tree shots.

This is more than vaporware. Kodak's now marketing an industrial scanner that will allow you to bring your shoeboxes of images into a local retailer -- it's being tested at Wegmans right now -- and walk out with a Picture CD.

But not any old CD. The software is able to look for clues in the images and group them by decade, based on the type of photo technology that was prevalent in that time frame. For instance, there was a brief period when the photo industry liked to print pictures with rounded corners. With all that information in hand, it becomes relatively easy to direct the software to route the images to the 1970s file.

Mitch Goldstone, undoubtedly the nation's most outspoken photo retailer, has had this scanning service in place since last November. Though he's in California, he's willing to scan images long distance (if you're confident sending them!) Go to this site for more details.

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