Google has launched Picasa 3.5, an upgrade to their popular Photo Management software Picasa. The best feature in this upgrade is Face recognition. Picasa can recognize your photos that have faces. After that, it can group photos with similar faces together, and let you name tag all of them at once. Isn’t it cool!
Picasa does a really great job in finding similar faces. Think about it for a minute that how difficult it actually is. In each photo, people might have a different facial expression, might have a different angle of face exposed, and might be under different lighting conditions. As an example, take a look at different pictures below:
So, identifying similar faces from a picture is really difficult job, and probably the biggest reason why this feature is still not commonly available in other software. Google has however got around the complexities of this, and have finally launched this facial recognition in a free software.
The facial reconginition is not completely perfect. Picasa will group photos with similar faces together, but it will still ask you to confirm that its grouping was correct. Based on your confirmation, the algorithm further improves and corrects itself. Once you have name tagged the images, you can directly upload them to Picasa Web album, and your name tags will be uploaded as well.
Another new feature in this update is improved geotagging. To geotag any image, you can just drag your photos on the new built-in google map. This makes the geotagging process really simple.
Apart from this, Picasa has all the wonderful features that it is known for. This update further pushes the stature of Picasa as one of the best free Photo Management suite available out there.