Picasa 3.5 adds facial recognition
Published: 23 Sep 2009 16:15 BST
Google has introduced an updated version of its Picasa software that can recognise faces in photos stored on users' computers.
Picasa 3.5 for Windows and Mac, announced on Tuesday in a Google blog post, comes about a year after the company rolled out the same facial recognition on its Picasa Web Albums site.
The Picasa software scans photos for faces, then groups together photos of specific people. The user must then tag the images to identify the people or confirm the application's guesses at contacts. If the images are of people in the user's Google address book, they can be looked up quickly using auto-complete. Otherwise, Google provides the option of adding a person as a new contact; this information then gets synced back to the Google address book.
Google has included features to help speed up the process. For example, where there are photos that are hosted both online and on a hard drive, if they have been scanned for faces in either situation, the Picasa software can grab that information and add it to the local library. This means it does not have to scan the same photos twice.
In addition, it provides 'yes' and 'no' buttons that can add or reject names suggested by the software. There is also a way to group-accept or group-decline its suggestions.
Along with facial recognition, the new version of the software integrates Google Maps geotagging. As with Picasa Web Albums, users can select a photo, search for a location in Google Maps, then add that geographic data by dropping a red pin on the map.
The release provides the capability to tag items that are spread out across an entire computer, as well as on external drives.
Credit: Picasa 3.5 brings facial recognition to the desktop from CNET News
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