socialmedian: Picasa 3.5 Organizes Your Photos with Facial Recognition [Downloads]

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Picasa 3.5 Organizes Your Photos with Facial Recognition [Downloads]

Source: Lifehacker

Sep 22, 2009

Summary

Windows/Mac: Google's free desktop photo organizer is stepping up to iPhoto's killer feature by adding face recognition and syncing it with Picasa Web Albums, making it easy to send Uncle Bob every single photo you've got of Aunt Marla.

The new Picasa 3.5 contains a facial recognition feature similar to the one already present on Picasa Web Albums, but letting it run over your likely vast collection of assorted photos stashed on your hard drive is a lot more convenient. Picasa creates a new sidebar menu list of "People," and asks you to name the folks it finds in its main "Scanning" menu. If you're signed into Web Albums with a Google account stuffed with contacts, that's pretty easily, actually—just start typing a name, then select the contact that pops up as you type.

You'll probably have to leave Picasa running a long time to get through everything—after 20 minutes, it's about 9 percent through with 13.8GB of photos on my laptop. As you might guess, some of the facial matching is hit and miss, but you get to approve any of the picks Picasa isn't absolutely