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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.
Sending another (admittedly pretty) digital picture frame into an already overcrowded, under-innovated field, Sony has announced is US$300 Vaio CP1, which boasts wireless networking, RSS feed integration and - most interestingly - Shoutcast radio streaming. The picture display capabilities are also above average, as the frame can show photos directly from its 128MB of internal storage, a wide variety of common media cards or even Picasa albums stored online.
As you can see in the clip above, Panasonic's Wi-Fi enabled 
Ality has upgraded their PIXXA digital photo frame, although too late for the Xmas buying season. Their new 800 x 600 Wireless PIXXA with Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, built-in speaker and MP3 playback can instantly show photos sent using their Web-based Photo Messenger application, as well as displaying your dates, news and weather. The most interesting this, apart from the its design, is their calendar system. It connects to Google Calendar and can schedule photos to display in specific dates. Their interface is quite elegant:
