Posts Tagged ‘pictures’

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.

I have been using Picasa for several years.  If I am looking at a picture on my computer, chances are good I’m probably using Picasa to do it, especially if it’s a picture from my digital camera.

Above is a picture I took for Buzz.  He has converted all of his overhead transparencies to PowerPoint slides by having me photograph each picture.  Then he creates a slide from each picture in PowerPoint.

The whole process is actually very low tech.  We use a white piece of foam core on Buzz’s desk.  He holds the foam core at an angle so we don’t get a shadow from the lights in the ceiling.  I snap a picture.  Picasa does the rest.

In the Tuning tab of Picasa is a Highlights adjustment.  By cranking this up, all the edges of the paper and shadows go away and leave only the black ink behind.  It’s literally that easy.  I export the picture and it’s finished about ten times faster than a scanner could do.

Now if I could only figure out who this Sherman character is.

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?