Posts Tagged ‘picasa’

Google continues to crank out innovative features in their products.  Today the web version of Picasa added face recognition.  The way it works is intriguing.  After you activate the feature, Picasa goes through all your photos and groups them based on who is in each picture.  All the pictures identified with the same person are then presented together.  Picasa asks once - who is this?  You type the name and all the pictures are tagged with that person’s name.  If a list of photos contains extra pictures (a couple of my kids were identified as the same person), the mis-identified pictures can be dropped from the list.  If a picture contains more than one person, it will show up in several lists as Picasa asks you to identify each person in each photo.

Here’s where it gets interesting.  After names are associated with faces, any picture that is opened will list the people in the photo.  Mouse-over a face and Picasa identifies the person.

This adds a new dimension to searching.  I did a query on all the pictures with Me and Kayla.  This photo came to the top of the list.

Before you add names to all your pictures, consider the privacy settings.  When you enter information about a person, the data includes nickname, full name and email address.  By default, only the nickname associated with a photo shows up on the public side.

Considering the way pictures are identified by current search engines, this new feature of Picasa is a potential game-changer.  I cannot wait for this feature to be added to the desktop version of Picasa.  I have about 50,000 pictures that it can tag.

I was playing around with my Picasa account on the iPod Touch and suddenly everything looked different.  I thought I had adjusted the browser somehow to make Picasa look better on the Touch.  As it turned out, Google did an upgrade to the site and optimized it for the Touch. 

In addition to better Picasa integration, gMail and gReader have also been tweaked for the Touch.  I still need the “open in a new window” option for the browser, but I am finding the portable browser to be so convenient, I use it more than my laptop.  It turns on in a couple of seconds and can do everything except Flash. 

More later…