The stand alone Picasa application from Google now recognizes who is in your pictures and groups all the pictures based on this information. The web version of Picasa has had this feature for at least a year. I blogged about it last September.
I just installed the update and it’s only about 2% complete with the initial “face” scan. I have 92,000 pictures, so it will probably take all night to go through them.
As the program identifies new faces, a new icon is added to the “scanned pictures” group. Type a new name under one of these pictures and Picasa begins to group other pictures of this person under the same name. If the program is unsure of a picture (some of my kids look like each other) the pictures have a “check” and “X” under them so they can be easily added or removed from a group. If there is a large number of picture you wish to move to another group, the click-shift-click method will highlight a large number of photos. A context sensitive right-click offers options on re-assigning the pictures to another group.
I see some useful applications for this already. I have photos of every freshman who has taken my edtech class for the last four years. I could build a database of these students and then as other people in the college take photographs, we could sort them by person. Wouldn’t it be great if every senior could be given a personalized set of photos showing all the major events of a college education? I think we are getting close.