Keyword: Illusion

I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom to manage my photo collection for almost 20 years, and my photo library includes scans of negatives going back even further. Since I was a professional photographer for much of that time, I got in the habit of keywording my images with the most visible people, places, and objects, for easy retrieval. It’s tedious but for me it’s worth the effort to find what I need quickly.

Now, of course, AI tools make that much easier. They can recognize what’s in an image and take over that menial task of keywording in even more detail than I would. I use a Lightroom plug-in called Excire (also available as a standalone app) to do that work.

Sometimes I have fun typing a random word and just seeing what it comes up with, and it surfaces pictures I haven’t seen in forever. Like I’ll just type in happy or blurry or dinner or whatever else comes to mind and be presented with images I’d forgotten about.

The other day, I typed the word illusion. I haven’t manually tagged any photos as illusions, so I was curious what it would come up with. I wonder what the algorithm considers as an illusion. I found the results really interesting, some more obviously “illusion” than others.

Since I’ve been on vacation for the past week and haven’t had time to write my usual over-written newsletter, this week I simply present a selection of personal photos that my computer thinks should be tagged as “illusion.”

Enjoy.

And that’s it for another newsletter. If you have a photo library that let’s you search by keyword, send me your favorite “illusion” search result.

Thanks as always for reading. I’m working on something really fun for next time. See you then!

David