Posts Tagged ‘pictures’

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.

John mentioned this mosaic program during EdTechWeekly last night.  AndreaMosaic is free.  You provide the program a directory of your pictures and one target image.  Above is something I created today.  I pointed AM to the folder with our pictures from Disney’s Magic Kingdom.  As the target, I found a GIF of Mickey Mouse.  The program went to work and in a few minutes created a collage (click picture for higher resolution) of our Disney pictures in the shape of that famous mouse.

The big question is whether or not my image is a violation of copyright law.  I know the image of Mickey Mouse is protected by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.  But what about my pictures arranged in the shape of Mickey?