Tonfotos Reviews 18

Pretty impressive.
Since iView/Expression Media/MediaPro disappeared from the scene, I have been looking for a suitable programm to replace it. Tonfotos seems to be a strong candidate. I am still evaluating it but so far so good.

super responsive, very good development, solution active and evolving following the market

I have been using Tonfotos for over a year now. The Tonfotos team has always been there to help with any questions I have. Many times, the feature I thought I would like to use was already incorporated in the program. If it was not, the team is more than willing to research my request and add it to their program. I can't say enough about how easy it is to use. Once you get your photos in, just sit back and enjoy your photos instead of searching for them.

Very good program for organizing photos on a PC, with google demanding a fee for their alternative each month i was looking for a standalone PC app for organizing photos with facial recognition, this one fits the bill and more, very easy to use, free version lets you recognise up to 12 faces but for the small fee to support the paid version it supports the developer who has made a very good app in my opinion.

Easy to use (especially if you watch the tutorials first). Powerful and fast.

After reading lots of positive reviews I installed TF and was shocked at the massive disc space required for it to run. It required 160Gb to catalogue a 600Gb pictures folder. That's an additional 25% for every single image!

There was no upfront warning about this or that TF goes and creates dozens of extra folders full of duplicate images.

Don't use unless you have lots of spare disc capacity, including in your backup facility.

Update: through Tonfotos I learned that TF does not create folders by default but, during installtion and setup, it's easy to inadvertently do this. Set up correctly it's a good piece of software but it's in dire need of a manual. Luckily online help is pretty good.

Tonfotos is particularly great for anyone who has used face recognition software like Picasa because tonfotos imports the face data created by other programs. The weeks of putting names to faces in Picasa is not lost.

Tonfotos does a much better job than Picasa or other software that I have used, for face recognition in photos. It finds most reasonable faces in a picture even when the picture is blurry, under or overexposed, and the face is small, partly turned away from the camera and obscured by a hat or sunglasses. Tonfotos clusters similar faces and suggests faces that are similar to ones that are already assigned to a name.

Tonfotos supports relationship linking so it is easy to jump between the faces for family members, friends and coworkers. It also has groups so I can focus on faces of family, extended family, work, friends, etc.

Tonfotos supports geotagging with pictures taken at a location shown on a map and accessible with a mouse click. The map can be zoomed out to capture the pictures from a larger area (e.g. town), or zoomed in to select pictures from a more specific location (e.g. a house). General tagging is used to group pictures in albums.

Tonfotos supports rotating, moving, deleting and other picture file management actions.

The free version is fully functional but limits full user access to a limited number of names. It imported my catalog of names from Picasa, found many more faces, let me assign additional faces to a limited number of names, and let me assign those names to other faces. A single user/device license or the 5 user/device license unlocks all names and does not require rescanning the picture files. The license is freely transferrable between devices/operating systems. Tonfotos runs on Windows 10/11, Mac OS, and Linux.

On first run, tonfotos takes a long time to catalog pictures, identify faces, determine face geometry, compute attributes for comparing faces, and clustering similar faces. My 80,000 pictures took about a day. After that, tonfotos continues to monitor for changes to files, scanning new files for additional faces, and reclustering faces to suggest similar ones. It uses CUDA (GPU acceleration) to accelerate face recognition.

A first time user might find the quantity of face suggestions overwhelming. I handle this by ctrl-clicking all thumbnails that I never want to see again (e.g. faces of pets, strangers, and extraneous things like plants) then tapping shift-backspace. Then I ctrl-click to select all faces that are not the person whose name I am considering and tap backspace to dismiss these suggestions. Then I shift-click the remaining faces and tap shift-Return to assign the faces to this name. Along the way I might also click or shift-click to select other faces that I recognize, right click, and assign them to a name. Each time I add faces to a name, tonfotos looks for more faces that are similar to the ones that I just added and suggests them.

I prefer that tonfotos suggests some extraneous faces (e.g. pets, statues) rather than have it miss some faces of interest; and I prefer that tonfotos suggests a lot of faces that it thinks are similar to the others that I have already associated with a name even if many look ridiculous because it is easier to dismiss incorrect face suggestions than to search through my pictures to find faces manually. The quality of face matching depends on the quality of the faces identified. Associating many blurry, small, poorly exposed faces that are partly obscured with a name, leads to many suggestions that are clearly not that person. Associating only clear, sharp, well exposed faces that are not partly obscured leads to better suggestions for face matches. Most users want many small blurry or partly obscured faces associated with a name because these might be a group shot from a family reunion, an artistic picture, or a family photo that includes some people who are partly turned away from the camera.

Tonfotos data is stored redundantly in both a database and .ini files that provides confidence that the naming data will not be lost.

Tonfotos has exceptional support through its online community. The developer responds promptly to all posts. When appropriate he requests logfiles generated by the program and my experience was that he reviewed the log and responded to me within a day. This program continues to evolve and the developer invites feature requests. From reviewing the community posts I can see that some feature requests are implemented quickly and for others the developer awaits more user input to see if the request is popular. The developer takes the time to explain the program limitations and behaviour in technical detail that is easy to understand.

Recommended. Affordable. Superb support. Ongoing development.

This is by far the best photo naming program i have ever tried

I am able to organise all my photos by person and it makes it so easy to find what I am looking for

If you painful missed Picasa, tonfoto is a worthy successor - or might become such in future. The similarity, particular the simplicity is great, like Picasa or Apple-Style. The Face Recognation is overwhelming, the best I've ever seen. Now other useful features need to be added, keeping the right balance between simplicity and functionality. It might become great...

My only reference is Google's Picasa. I have a very large photo collection and just added Tonfotos to a brand new computer. There are some advantages to Tonfotos. Picasa freezes up more often than Tonfotos, but Tonfotos also freezes up. Both programs do not have a method for following what I am trying to do at the moment, so I'm trying to clear faces out of a file, both programs tend to dump faces into the file you are working at the moment, and both programs interrupt my work process by adding more faces to the same file; experienced as a jumping about of the photos and a loss of my place of work. Why not do this in the background and give preference to what I am trying to do? Picasa seems to be able to "learn" faces better, and have a better selection of what to put in any given file. Neither are great, but both are good. Picasa gives me the option of "boxing any area of a photo to define a face, Tonfotos asks me to click on an unrecognized face and if it agrees (see the face) it will add it. Most often Tonfotos denies my wanted addition. Not sure how this helps me. I should know who the face is.

Overall, I am still using Tonfotos. Would love to see them fix up a few things. Both programs can overwhelm the processing power of my brand new computer. I'd opt for a slower program that adjusts to my computer capacity and does more work in the background. Good program, but it could be great.

I rated it 4 stars because there is always room for improvement. For example, I would like an OCR search on images to find text in scanned documents.
Thank you.