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.

[Picasa nametags]

Olympus has just augmented the Mju range of point-and-shoot digital cams with the new 1060 model. It seems no slouch for a small pocket camera: It's a 10-megapixel shooter, with a 7x optical zoom and "Dual Image Stabilisation" to reduce blur. Plus it's got an new intelligent mode that auto-detects the five most commonly used "scenes" and tweaks the exposure settings for you.

UPDATE: Olympus has just informed me that the mju 1060 will only be available in black in Australia, which isn't such a bad thing - it looks much better than the boring old silver model.

Read More »

The FujiFilm Finepix Z200fd Glam Cam is yet another digital camera on top of the massive mountain of sleek point and shoots. Yeah, it's really thin and will capture shots at up to 10MP with a 5x zoom lens. But it stands out for an odd reason--it's got a fantastic--and creepy--timer system.

Read More »

Sony has upgraded its HDR-CX7 flash-based camcorder to include face-recognition technology and Smile Shutter, which automatically takes a still picture as soon as the subject switches to full beam. The camera records in full HD at a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, and has a 10-megapixel camera for still shots. There's image stabilisation, and you control the camcorder merely by tapping the 2.7-inch LCD screen. Full press release for the US$900 camera, available in August, plus a bonus shot, is after the jump.

Read More »

 For everybody who's been hanging out for the local release date and of "the world's smallest Full HD camcorder" from Sony, we've got the details here.

A new biometric face scanner from the Japanese company Sagawa Advance has taken the technology to the next level, able to differentiate between identical twins with no problems at all. It does this by using an infrared scanner to analyse a whopping 40,000 data points on your face.

Read More »

Olympus' new FE cameras—FE-280 ($200), FE-290 ($250) and FE-300 ($300)—are built to be "fun" and "easy," with a smile-recognition program, a way to fix bad images on the fly, and other cool tricks, plus a 12-megapixel version for $300.

The FE-280 and FE-300 are essentially the same camera with 2.5" LCDs and 3x optical zoom lenses. The difference is, one registers 8 megapixels while the other carries a whopping 12 (and for $300!). They both have face detection, digital image stabilization, and something called "perfect shot preview," which simultaneously previews different exposures, white balances and metering so you can choose (and learn). They also have the Perfect Fix, which tweaks blurred, red-eye infested or poorly lit images after you take them.

Read More »