Late to the Party

 I've noticed several genimates posting caricatures on social media and, as I have a bit of spare time for play this week, decided to hop on the bandwagon. 

I started with a very simple prompt suggested in a ChatGPT advertisement on Facebook. It was suggested to add a photo of me with the following prompt. "Create a caricature of me based on everything you know about me." 

What came back was a creditable caricature of me but with very thick painted on eyebrows. The image focused on my interests in reading and travel but made no reference to family history. It also had a cat plonked on the desk, I'm a dog girl through and through. 

After asking ChatGPT to recognise my involvement with family history, make a few deletions (cat and eyebrows) and to add a dog like my Paddy plus my GeniAus avatar I was rewarded with the following which I think is quite representative. 

Should I ask ChatGPT to add something else to recognise my obsession for taking thousands of snapshots on my smartphone and camera  as I wander around our world? 

Following Taneya's Tip

I love it when I pick up a really useful tip from another geneablogger.

Yesterday as I was catching up on some blog reading I came across a recent Tech Tuesday post from Taneya Koonce in which she talked about the organisation of her digital images. She mentioned that she had been a user of Picasa but that when Google withdrew support for that product she returned to an ACDSee  product she had used previously.

That post was so timely for me as I have been looking around for something to replace Picasa.  Picasa still works but I don't want to be in a situation where it may crash and I lose all the info I have added to my images with the program.

I immediately investigated the ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 10 program by seeking out reviews and reading posts in user groups. There was a lot of positivity so I took advantage of the month's free trial and downloaded the program.

Playing with ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 10

After 6 hours use I find that it is a sophisticated package that has some features I may never use but it does what I want and more. The tags I had assigned to all my images in Picasa have appeared in the IPTC Metadata keyword field. This was a major criteria for me, a feature that was essential. Being able to apply metadata that conforms to IPTC international standards is most important to this old librarian, I have spent most of my time today doing that. I have played around with retrieving images from my sample collection and that works well.

I only had to resort to the Help Menu a couple of times as I played with my photos from 2017 so I guess that means it is fairly intuitive.

ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 10  is not cheap but is on special online for $USD99 until 17th January. I won't be parting with my money immediately. I'll play with the program a little more but I am confident that I have found a solution that suits my purposes.