Picasa Upgrade Adds Facial Recognition to Photo Sharing

[Jason]

I'll be honest, I haven't used Picasa in probably over a year, but with this and I'm sure other new features, I'll probably give it another look.

Picasa Web Albums, Google’s free and therefore widely-popular photo-sharing tool, added facial recognition technology to online photo albums Tuesday.

The system now lets you automatically tag your photos with your friends’ names (pulled from your Gmail contacts, if you have them). The technology is frighteningly intuitive and quick to learn, suggesting the appropriate name tag when it recognizes your friends in photos you’ve uploaded.

Turn on the “name tags” feature and Picasa will automatically scan the pictures you’ve uploaded, picking out the ones it thinks have faces in them. Then, you can attach name tags to individual photos of people, or to groups of photos the software has identified as showing similar faces. It makes for a fun little game, tagging the people you know with the matching Gmail contact. Picasa quickly starts learning who’s who as you continue to tag your way through your pictures. After tagging for a bit, it will be able to recognize your friends and automatically suggest name tags of the people in your photos. Once the photos have been tagged with names, you can cluster or filter photos based on who’s in them, then create and share slideshows featuring specific friends.

Read the complete article @ WebMonkey