Algorithmia - Colorize Your Photos Automatically

Welcome back, it has been a few weeks since my last post. I have been extremely busy at work over the last couple weeks working on a tight deadline. If you don't know, my real job is as a supervisory biologist for the US Fish & Wildlife Service working on the Everglades Restoration Project. My job focuses on making sure that proposed projects do not harm endangered species. The past year and a half I have been working with a team to make sure that the Cape Sable seaside sparrow doesn't go extinct in the near future. The population dropped about 25% this year from an estimated population of 3,200 down to an estimated 2,400 individuals. This species is showing signs similar to what was observed in the Dusky seaside sparrow that went extinct in 1987 and the Florida grasshopper sparrow which is now down to less than 200 individuals. I think working with highly imperiled species gives me a better prospective of why I do family history research, I don't want to see these rare artifacts and stories disappear any more than I would want to see one of our rare species disappear. Now that I have given you something to think about, I will provide you with another review of a product that I recently tried out.

I was reading Dick Eastman's blog about the Algorithmia web site. He was talking about how this site can colorize your old black & white photos. For most users, this site is free but if you have a large number of photos there may be a charge. After reading the review I thought this might be an interesting site to try.

The Algorithmia site is accessed at http://demos.algorithmia.com/colorize-photos/. Your photos need to be accessible by a web link. So I tried some of the photos that I have posted to my other blog (http://ourancestories.blogspot.com/) and from Facebook. You don't need to set up an account in order to use the colorize feature. The accounts seem to be for developers who want to contribute code to various projects they are developing.

Here are the results for a few of my photos:

Before

Colorized

Before

Colorized

Before

Colorized

Before

Colorized

Generally the photos I have provided above look ok. Some pictures work much better than others. Some of the colors are way off, like the red area of the suit jacket in the last two colorized photos. Many of the black & white photos just came out in a sepia tone or the sepia photos came out a bit more brown. Overall, it is an interesting site to play with, and depending on your photos, has the potential to bring new life into your family history. But for the purists, it probably isn't something you want to do to all your photos.