I have always loved Picasa for the way it manages my huge (~14gb) pictures collection, and yesterday it went even better. Picasa 3.5 introduced facial recognition technology, allowing me to easily tag pictures with the people in it. The program automatically scans all my pictures in the background to find faces in them, and allows me to tag the people those faces represent. It even goes beyond that, by actually grouping similar faces automatically so that I do not have to tag each individual face by hand. When the similarity is not so conclusive, Picasa puts face tags to your consideration, and I can confirm or reject these suggestions. This all has a margin of error of course, but by the time I am writing this, it has scanned over 80% of my collection and there have been almost no mistakes, all of which I have been able to correct by hand in no time. Picasa was rapidly able to get to know most of my relatives and friends.
Having migrated to Mac not so long ago, I am aware that Apple’s default picture managing software already had this feature, although I cannot really say how it worked. I did try iPhoto for a few hours on my first days with my new MacBook, but I immediately hated it for trying to hide my pictures from me. Picasa at least respects my organizational scheme at the file-system level, instead of imposing me one, and I am still able to access my pictures through Finder.
As Picasa recognizes faces, you can add information about this people as you tag them. It can even use (and sync with) your Google Account contacts if you are signed in to Picasa Web Albums. It would be nice though, if it gave you the choice in Mac OS X to use the system’s address book instead, or alternatively. And as a side note, face recognition is not the only new feature of Picasa 3.5, also including in the package geo-tagging with a Google Maps panel withing Picasa’s interface, and more. For the time being, this new version has only been released for Windows and Mac in its English version. Non-English speaking users, or Linux fans, will have to wait a bit. Not to say that Mac people should be completely happy though, because I am still waiting for Picasa to port the very nice picture viewer that it installs on Windows.
In the mean time, I can enjoy watching a slideshow of pictures with me and my girlfriend in it, or detailing how my niece’s face has changed over time since she was born just a few years ago. Face recognition rocks. But beware, if you are a fanatic of organization, it can get become addictive!
PS: I wanted to include a screenshot, but I don’t feel right to publish an image with lots of pictures of faces and names of actual people, without their consent, and painting black areas over names and faces renders the screenshot useless for its original purpose. So I am going on without it. If you want to see it working, download the program and give it a try.
I use both Picassa and Flickr for sharing photos over the internet but i use Flickr more often than Picassa.–*
both picassa and flickr are good if you want to share pictures online;,-
my family album is on Picassa and also on Flickr, they are great for backing up your digital photos “”
,,* I am really thankful to this topic because it really gives useful information :.`