Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2006/03/31
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]This is a variation of a classic computer science problem. It's hard, and there's no software outside international government spy agencies that can do it. The only way to make it tractable is to define a classification scheme for the pictures and sort them into similarity groups. The scheme doesn't matter; you can do it by color, by whether or not it contains a chimney, by whether or not it contains a person, or how much of the paint is peeling. Once you've broken down the "several thousand" pictures into clusters (groups whose contents are similar according to your primary criterion) then pick one of those clusters and repeat the process. If the cluster consists of all photographs that have a chimney at the left side or all photographs that show shark teeth, find sub-categories to allow you to further divide the clusters into sub-clusters. Keep doing this until you get groups that have under about 50 pictures in them. Then compare by hand; the sub-sub-clusters will be small enough that you won't have any trouble finding similar pictures. I've done this 3 or 4 times in my life, this process works.