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Picasa Adds Face Recognition To Web Albums
Posted by Nick Broughall at 10:59 AM on September 4, 2008
Most people have thousands of digital photos in their collections. One of the cool new features available in Picasa's Web Albums (which kind of got swept away in the torrent of Chrome coverage the last couple of days) is the ability to tag faces in your photos quickly and easily.
If you have photos on a Picasa web album already, you can enable the feature in settings. It then scans all your photos in the Picasa web album, before grouping similar faces together. You then work through those by giving name tags.
You'll quite often have to repeat the same person in different groups of photos, so it's a far from perfect solution. But it does make the tagging process much quicker than manually going through every photo.
It's also secure, enabling better searching and more freedom for specific collections of photos, and you can share tagged photos with the people in them easily as well. Any images you share via Picasa also only shares the nicknamed tag you've put on the photo, not any further details like contact information.
This is a really useful development for cataloguing your photos, but why it's only available online and not in desktop photo management software like iPhoto or Picasa for Windows is beyond me. Hopefully we'll see it rolled out to desktop applications sooner rather than later.
Comments
Flame
Posted September 4, 2008 12:27 PM
Hmm "Name tagging is only available for Picasa Web Albums accounts in the United States at this time."
Patrick green
Posted September 4, 2008 12:52 PM
OZZIES HAVE TO WAIT!!!
After hair tearing, downloading Picasa Desktop, reading all the help, seraching blogs and forums, Ive found this is only available to US residents at the moment.
Hopefully soon us poor Ozzies will be able to enjoy this latest offering from the google gods.
Nick Broughall
Posted September 4, 2008 1:35 PM
@Patrick Green - that's weird... it worked for me this morning...
StevoTheDevo
Posted September 4, 2008 2:54 PM
I reckon I had the option when I logged into my account and clicked Settings..
I selected an option that sounded most like Face Recognition (I can't recall what it was) clicked "Save Settings" went and checked some of my albums to find no face recognition option, went back into settings and the option was gone!!
ed
Posted September 4, 2008 3:19 PM
No one else worried that a Private firm has face recognition and peoples names on a huge searchable Database? ON THE INTERNET?
Stefano
Posted September 15, 2008 11:35 PM
Hey, this is a pretty neat review. All props go out to Google for pulling this one off, however, they are not the only ones with this tech.
Have a look at the photo sharing capabilities of MyHeritage, a family oriented social networking site.
A few things that set them apart are:
1) The Pics are fully integrated with your family tree.
2) They have a more ‘open’ concept, which allows you to import photos from other web properties (such as Picasa), and export the tags back.
3) The service is available in a multitude of other languages.
Anyway, hope this adds a bit of value to your post.
Cheers.