Picasa Face Recognition
Sep 20th, 2008 by Andy
Recently Google rolled out an update to it’s Picasa desktop photo management software and the corresponding Picasa Web Albums. When I heard about this I had mixed feelings for a few reasons. First of all, I’ve always liked Picasa but lately I’ve become more of a Mac user and it’s only available on Windows (although there have been rumors of a Mac version some day, but Google makes no mention of it) - so right when I was thinking I could get by with iPhoto it seemed like some great new update to Picasa might be coming out. The other reason was a claim that the Web Albums would now have face detection capabilities.
Well, I’ve been there, done that back in the day with Riya and I wasn’t impressed. So I was skeptical of Google being able to provide this service (something I think would be really useful).
I’ve had a chance to try out the face recognition stuff with some of my photos and I’m quite impressed. It isn’t perfect but it’s much, much better than anything Riya ever had. Google also seems to have taken a more realistic approach and uses a decent amount of human input (by me) to get the face tagging correct. They could stand to improve that process/user experience some but overall it’s not bad.
With less than an hour of effort I have tagged 634 of the 3,821 faces Picasa has found in my web albums. So now I’m trying to figure out what to do. Maybe I’ll use iPhoto to interface with Picasa Web Albums and give up on the Picasa desktop application. Hmm, I’m not sure.
