# Canon launches “PHIL”, a photo culling app for iOS



## Canon Rumors Guy (Feb 11, 2021)

> Canon USA has launched a new photo culling app for iOS. Sorry, there’s no Android version at the moment. The app retails for $14.99 per year or $2.99 per month. Both options come with a free 3-day trial.
> The Photo Culling app will go through your library and find images that are similar or low-quality and will suggest which photos to keep and which photos to delete. Don’t worry though, you still have total control if the “AI” doesn’t agree with you.
> The app will also rate images based on sharpness, noise, emotion and whether or not your subjects have their eyes closed.
> This seems like a good idea if you happen to shoot 20fps at stationary objects.
> ...




[url=https://www.canonrumors.com/canon-launches-a-photo-culling-app-for-ios/]Continue reading...


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## snapshot (Feb 11, 2021)

very cool. dont understand running it on a phone -- my photos arent on my phones cf-express type-a card. might be good to run on the camera.


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## SHAMwow (Feb 11, 2021)

Also don't get the subscription. I can't stand how every damn thing needs to be a subscription now.


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## MadManA (Feb 12, 2021)

Phone only is dumb. At the very least a native iPad app, but a desktop version is the best option. I am doing a trial and on its first run, it actually did a good job. But I am not sure I want to go from camera to desktop, make a jpeg version, upload to an iOS device, cull the photos, download again to desktop, match the winning photos. I don't see the great time savings. I despise going through group photos looking for the "winners". I know some [email protected]$$ will say take fewer photos, but I shoot in burst with group photos because someone will blink, another does not smile in time, etc., etc., so burst is helpful when trying to satisfy clients. There is a place for software like this, just not in its current form.


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## snapshot (Feb 12, 2021)

Burst is awesome. Only way to approach group photos. I tend to go for f8, focus on front row, zoom in on back row to confirm focus and get 100 shots at 7 fps or what ever my camera will do. and yeah it would be great if camera would identify the photos where everybody has eyes open and have their best smiles... DPP to the rescue???


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## goldenhusky (Feb 12, 2021)

Yeah, that's right... the last thing we need is a subscription based culling software. Lately there is no limit for greed with pretty much all corporates.


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## rawshooter (Feb 12, 2021)

Yea don't get the "on the phone" part, if LR mobile would support plug-ins and it would be one, it could sync back to desktop, but this..

But then this could be a native LR feature.


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## AJ (Feb 12, 2021)

snapshot said:


> very cool. dont understand running it on a phone -- my photos arent on my phones cf-express type-a card. might be good to run on the camera.


Yeah that was my reaction: 1) cool I want this, then 2) what the #! it runs on a phone?
It'd be great to have this as LR/Bridge plugin


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## snapshot (Feb 12, 2021)

why they dont have canon app store for their cameras by now, i dont know. they have the compute. they have a touch screen interface. mostly have wifi. only weak point i can see is lack of storage for cameras without dual card slots. i dont know how much room they have in the firmware storage for optional stuff.


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## Bahrd (Feb 12, 2021)

I am afraid I am not assertive enough to learn (on a daily basis!) that a majority of my shots is so poor that even a phone knows it!


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## dwarven (Feb 13, 2021)

goldenhusky said:


> Yeah, that's right... the last thing we need is a subscription based culling software. Lately there is no limit for greed with pretty much all corporates.



It would be greed if it was a required service. Since it's optional, I don't see how it would be considered greedy. It's just an option for people who want it. But yeah, I don't understand why it's phone only. This would probably be useful as a desktop application.


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## Chris.Chapterten (Feb 13, 2021)

I’m guessing the reason it is for phone only is because this app is targeted towards people who don’t want to spend time culling photos or shooting in raw and just want to upload some decent photos to social media. I couldn’t imagine a pro ever trusting this AI and I know I would personally feel compelled to go through all of the photos in my normal process.

Honestly I just wish they would make DPP run as fast as the Adobe products. I’d rather pay $3 a month for that..


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## MadManA (Feb 13, 2021)

Hey, it was announced last year as a Lightroom plugin. 

Canon Rumors: Canon announces photographer matching service and Photo Culling plug-in for Adobe Lightroom Classic

Canon LR Plugin


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## hachu21 (Feb 13, 2021)

What a great way to train an IA while being paid! They already use your pictures for this if you go through their Canon.image service.
Always keep in mind that Canon is trying hard on CCTV, IP cam and all the surveillance software that goes with it (IA for facial recognition, among other creepy things).
For the foreseeable future, i'm sad to say that there is more growth expected there than in photography industry.


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## Joules (Feb 13, 2021)

hachu21 said:


> What a great way to train an IA while being paid! They already use your pictures for this if you go through their Canon.image service.
> Always keep in mind that Canon is trying hard on CCTV, IP cam and all the surveillance software that goes with it (IA for facial recognition, among other creepy things).
> For the foreseeable future, i'm sad to say that there is more growth expected there than in photography industry.


Watch out people. Forget about artificial intelligence, now even intelligent artificial is coming for you!


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## SteveC (Feb 13, 2021)

Joules said:


> Watch out people. Forget about artificial intelligence, now even intelligent artificial is coming for you!


It's the French version, adjective after the noun. 

Excuse me, the "version Français."


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## Joules (Feb 13, 2021)

SteveC said:


> It's the French version, adjective after the noun.
> 
> Excuse me, the "version Fraçais."


Sure, fair enough. I usually avoid commenting on people's language, apologies if it comes across as an insult. I just felt like goofing around a bit, since I don't perceive Canon to be a noteworthy thread compared to many other players in the field of face detection aided surveillance.


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## SteveC (Feb 13, 2021)

Joules said:


> Sure, fair enough. I usually avoid commenting on people's language, apologies if it comes across as an insult. I just felt like goofing around a bit, since I don't perceive Canon to be a noteworthy thread compared to many other players in the field of face detection aided surveillance.


No, it didn't come across to me as an insult, but then I didn't post the comment.

Languages, though, are a casual hobby of mine and differences in grammar (like head first or head last) are always interesting.


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## AlanF (Feb 13, 2021)

SteveC said:


> It's the French version, adjective after the noun.
> 
> Excuse me, the "version Fraçais."


Fraçais? Fracas?


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## SteveC (Feb 13, 2021)

AlanF said:


> Fraçais? Fracas?


 Oh, for Pete's sake. Now I know why that just didn't look right. Thank you--fixed.


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## RLP (Feb 13, 2021)

Excire-search is already doing that job perfect in LR as a plugin and I also use it as a standalone version on the laptop. I paid once and all the information will not distributed anywhere. For me the best combination, good results and also fast with almost 200,000 pictures in the LR catalog and on the NAS.
https://www.excire.com/en/excire-search-2/ 
Rene


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## jdavidse (Feb 14, 2021)

MadManA said:


> Phone only is dumb. At the very least a native iPad app, but a desktop version is the best option. I am doing a trial and on its first run, it actually did a good job. But I am not sure I want to go from camera to desktop, make a jpeg version, upload to an iOS device, cull the photos, download again to desktop, match the winning photos. I don't see the great time savings. I despise going through group photos looking for the "winners". I know some [email protected]$$ will say take fewer photos, but I shoot in burst with group photos because someone will blink, another does not smile in time, etc., etc., so burst is helpful when trying to satisfy clients. There is a place for software like this, just not in its current form.


This isn't for your camera files. This is for your phone pictures, on your phone. That's it.

I loaded it and it says I have 31k photos and videos. It's for this scenario.


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## MadManA (Feb 14, 2021)

jdavidse said:


> This isn't for your camera files. This is for your phone pictures, on your phone. That's it.
> 
> I loaded it and it says I have 31k photos and videos. It's for this scenario.











Canon announces photographer matching service and Photo Culling plug-in for Adobe Lightroom Classic


MELVILLE, NY, January 7, 2020 – Helping photographers boost their business and productivity while helping to build trust and customer confidence, Canon U.S.



www.canonrumors.com






Announced a year ago as a lightroom plugin with a youtube video showing it working with lightroom


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## mb66energy (Feb 14, 2021)

"good idea if you happen to shoot 20fps" - made me laugh! After viewing a video about R5 and Sony Alpha1 where they filled 1 Terabyte within some hours of testing both cameras ... I thought that Canon has some stock at from disk manufacturers ...


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## hachu21 (Feb 14, 2021)

Joules said:


> Watch out people. Forget about artificial intelligence, now even intelligent artificial is coming for you!





SteveC said:


> It's the French version, adjective after the noun.
> 
> Excuse me, the "version Français."


Oops! I slipped on this one. Yes, IA is for my native french 
("Version française" since "version" is a feminine word )


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## SteveC (Feb 14, 2021)

hachu21 said:


> Oops! I slipped on this one. Yes, IA is for my native french
> ("Version française" since "version" is a feminine word )



Whoops. Just as tricky as German, apparently, you can't tell from the word by itself (or if you can, I just don't know the rules). (With Russian, at least the feminine words almost always end in -a and neuter with -o. That works, of course until you see an accusative masculine (ends in -a too) and don't realize it's in the accusative.) 

Arbitrary grammatical gender is one thing I am glad the Anglo Saxons dumped.


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## Joules (Feb 14, 2021)

SteveC said:


> Whoops. Just as tricky as German, apparently, you can't tell from the word by itself (or if you can, I just don't know the rules). (With Russian, at least the feminine words almost always end in -a and neuter with -o. That works, of course until you see an accusative masculine (ends in -a too) and don't realize it's in the accusative.)
> 
> Arbitrary grammatical gender is one thing I am glad the Anglo Saxons dumped.


I don't known them by heart anymore, but there are guidelines you can follow to estimate a word's gender in both German and French (I'm german and I took french throughout 'middle school' and 'high school'). There are some actual rules, like certain endings guaranteeing a certain gender, but they don't cover all words. I would not call it arbitrary, but more about feelings than facts. 'version' has a soft sounding ending pronounced in french, so masculine article would just not fit.

At least French only has two genders, and not three such as german. It's the sort of thing you just develop an intuition for as you pick up the language. But there's no clean rule to pin down a words gender if it hasn't been established before. In german, for many words adapted from other languages or product names, you will have people agreeing on one article that just sounds wrong, but disagreeing which one sounds right. It certainly isn't 'der Nutella' (for the sweet stuff you put on bread), but 'die Nutella' and 'das Nutella' both sound okay to me. But apparently there are people who consider 'der Paprika' (the pepper) to be okay, which boggles my mind - it clearly is 'die Paprika' 

Not disagreeing with you though. My english being a lot better than my french has a lot to do with the effort it takes to learn and maintain the language skill


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## hachu21 (Feb 14, 2021)

Joules said:


> since I don't perceive Canon to be a noteworthy thread compared to many other players in the field of face detection aided surveillance.


Canon singapore website


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## RGF (Feb 14, 2021)

Love to see this as LR plugin. Give star ratings or simply set flags (Keep, uncertain, toss). Ideally the ap would learn what I like and adjusting its ratings on how I adjust the flags or stars. On an iPhone - why bother. Seems more like a joke or someone's kids science project than a real product.


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## Joules (Feb 14, 2021)

hachu21 said:


> Canon singapore website


My point was just that there is a difference between creating a tool and using it for nefarious purposes. The technology is not inherently evil.


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## Kiton (Feb 14, 2021)

I really do not understand this one.

Just buy a copy of Photo Mechanic and use it to batch IPTC add, rename and cull without relying on "ai" and introducing another wild card to potentially screw it up.


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## tmroper (Feb 15, 2021)

hachu21 said:


> What a great way to train an IA while being paid! They already use your pictures for this if you go through their Canon.image service.
> Always keep in mind that Canon is trying hard on CCTV, IP cam and all the surveillance software that goes with it (IA for facial recognition, among other creepy things).
> For the foreseeable future, i'm sad to say that there is more growth expected there than in photography industry.


Not only that, as an added bonus, this software will help train people to take photos that AI likes better, so surveillance software can more easily find what it's looking for. A sharp, well-lit image of Uncle Karl at the rally is a lot easier to deal with than a blurry one with bad composition!


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## OneSnark (Feb 15, 2021)

Hmmm.

Another subscription program. And one with questionable privacy issues.

Nope. . . automatic disqualification.. . . . . I dumped lightroom and quicken. . . . . programs that I was heavily invested in (Quicken since the 90's - - > Lightroom since V1.0) the moment they went to annual subscription.

I bought Capture One - - - couldn't be happier. (But I will dump that as well the moment they drop the perpetual license option)

The _only_ subscription program I would consider is MS office. . . and actually. . . my company pays for that. Once I start paying. . .I might go for google docs.


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## SteveC (Feb 15, 2021)

Joules said:


> I don't known them by heart anymore, but there are guidelines you can follow to estimate a word's gender in both German and French (I'm german and I took french throughout 'middle school' and 'high school'). There are some actual rules, like certain endings guaranteeing a certain gender, but they don't cover all words. I would not call it arbitrary, but more about feelings than facts. 'version' has a soft sounding ending pronounced in french, so masculine article would just not fit.


I took some German in high school [which is how I knew to explain the sound in "plough/plow" unambiguously as << plau >> when we had that conversation] and they pretty much told us you had to memorize the word with the article because there was no other way to tell. So this is surprising to me. Or perhaps there is a sort of intuitive pattern which of course complete "newbies" won't get. 

Although gender is pretty "clean" in Russian, stress seems very arbitrary (_and_ it affects how the vowels are pronounced, so it's _very_ important) but eventually you get a sense for where it probably is. (_If_ you know where the stress goes and see the word in writing you can almost always get it right, so Russian is _almost_ phonetically spelled.) Some linguist could probably spend five years writing out a rule that's five pages long, but that's not going to fly in Russian 101. (From what you say I'm suspecting a similar thing could happen with German.) Instead they resort to putting an acute accent over the stressed syllable for learners' texts. And there's one vowel that always gets the stress...however it has a dieresis over it that they usually don't bother with, so you can't distinguish it from another much more common vowel. Again, that's supplied in textbooks, but not in the newspaper.

Every language has its strangenesses, except maybe for Esperanto and Interlingua.


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## Joules (Feb 15, 2021)

SteveC said:


> Every language has its strangenesses


Natural languages that is. You can tell that they are not the product of a well thought through design process, resulting in situations where more context than the written word is critical for communication to succeed - and even so, misunderstandings can occur.

One that I find funny was shown to me a while back: A sign with a message that only kind of works in english, I believe:





'This area is under surveillance for prevention of crimes by the police' - leaving it to the reader to interpret whether the police are doing the surveillance or the crimes  

Stuff like this is the reason why natural language processing is such a struggle for computers, while they understand perfectly well what to do when instructed through programming languages.

All the more impressive to have such diverse and mostly effective means of human to human communication available.


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## SteveC (Feb 15, 2021)

Joules said:


> 'This area is under surveillance for prevention of crimes by the police' - leaving it to the reader to interpret whether the police are doing the surveillance or the crimes



Oh, yes, I get that one!

Over in my other hobby someone mentioned an "ancient coin dealer" during a club meeting, and I had to ask whether it was the dealer or the coins that were ancient. He said, "both." [Ancient coins are generally those from before AD 500, and it's actually surprising to most people how common some of them, especially Roman coins, are.]


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