MediaPlace (Download Now, It’s Free) – (Sort of)

The interface appears to be in Windows Dark Mode. But in Win11 you get an accent colour around the windows of an application. This does not happen with MediaPlace. It’s a minor annoyance but indicates this is not a normal Windows application.

It will generate AI images but will use “credits” which appears to be the intended income stream.

For $8/month ($96.year) you get 100 credits but not all the AI features.

These include:
AI Cloning
AI Trainings
Face Swapping
Smart Fill
Reinagine

For the full feature set pay $24/month ($288/year) for 500 credits.

You can buy more credits $30/500 however I presume these will only apply to the version you have.

It seems unnecessarily complicated. It would be easier to provide
the full AI set and sell the credits by the bunch for all the AI generation tools.

A major feature is the auto-tagging. This is very helpful. It will identify people, objects and environments. It will create a “Main Colors” palette, but what would be more useful, especially for photographers is identifying images that need levels correction if they are too dark or light.

Another problem with the program is that it insists in placing the database and all the thumbnails in the root directory of the folders to be scanned.

This means that it will be included in my backups. Which is what I don’t want. It would be OK if it was just the database, but all the .webp images
get scanned into my jRiver Database.

Now for the good stuff:

The AI image generation is good and does not appear to to suffer from the extra limbs and fingers previously seen in AI generation tools. I could use ‘in the style of’ prompts and get a good likeness to well known people (Howard Shore & Neil Innes). And that’s me above.

But it does the usual American bad spelling (Color) and puritanical attitude to the stray nipple or hint of too much skin.

After a day of sign-up I got a 700meg bundle of stuff that included fonts,
icons, SCV images and MP3 files. The Icons and SVG could be useful as getting quality vector art for free is unusual.

AI Cloning looks interesting, however I have not tried this yet as it will require time to assemble a set of photos of one person.

Speech Generation is fun. There are about 90 voices available, and they do a good job. What I found missing was a way to provide pauses or emphasis in the delivery, as is needed in “Eats Shoots and Leaves”. Some form of imbedded tags could do this, e.g. “Eats (pause) Shoots and Leaves”.

Images can be subject to Background Removal, Color Burst, Smart Fill, Prompt Editing Object Removal, Text Removal and Expand.

The background removal, while impressive is not perfect and any automated process will always require refining in the final image.

But again, the “Prompt Editing” requires upgrading to the Pro version.

The most impressive thing this program will do is “Upscaling”. Taking a low-quality image and adding detail and smoothing (removing jpeg artifacts) I had not seen before. After some internet research, other programs will also do this.

For what this will do in the free version is impressive, and adding
the extra credits to continue is value for money.

I just wish they would change the business model so everyone could buy credits for all the features. This would mean changing from a time based ($/month) model to a use based ($/credits) one.

They are competing with other software in this space, so they need to keep developing. Maybe adding face recognition for name tagging would be a good next step.

So it will staying on the PC until the credits run out.

But I will not be letting this loose on my main folders of 60,000+ photos
but restricting it to a few.