Tonfotos: Photo and Video Viewer
Tonfotos is a free program designed for viewing photo and video files on Windows. It offers an intuitive and convenient way to navigate through a large collection of photos, helping users organize their archives effectively. With Tonfotos Image Viewer, users can easily locate specific images within their vast library, as everything is pre-sorted by dates, events, people, and places.
The program aims to evoke emotions by enabling users to revisit memories captured in photos. Whether looking at recent snapshots or images from decades past, Tonfotos allows users to reconnect with moments, faces of loved ones, and special occasions, immersing themselves in the nostalgia of holidays, gatherings, and vacations.
User reviews about Tonfotos
by Prospector16
Great photo management software with strong face recognition.
Tonfotos is particularly great for anyone who used to use Google Picasa because tonfotos imports the face data from the .picasa.ini files. 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.
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 shift-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 shift 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, under or overexposed 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 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.
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