Google Photo Management Software adds Face Recognition

The latest version of Google’s Picasa, Version 3.5, comes equipped with a powerful new feature – name tagging. This new enhancement has tempted me to move all my digital photos from Flickr and Smugmug to Google, not a small task mind you.

The new version of Picasa finds all the faces in your photos and presents the zoomed in image and asks you to name them. What’s amazing is that after you do that it automatically finds other matches and groups them. It does an amazing job.

As Google puts it:

Picasa 3.5 scans all the photos in your collection, identifies the ones with faces, and groups photos with similar faces together. It’s easy to add name tags to dozens of photos at once by clicking “Add a name” below a photo and typing the person’s name. Once you’ve tagged some pictures, you can make a face collage with one click, easily find all your pictures with the same two people in them, or upload your name tags to Picasa Web Albums

If you have a lot of photos of your kids, say from birth through marriage, you’ll most likely have to identify them at different stages in their life.

What’s very useful after you’ve name tagged your photos is that you can now easily find photos – especially useful if you have hundreds or even thousands of photos. And, you can find photos that contain any combination of people just by clicking on their face to add them to the group.

Additionally, you now can easily Geo-tag your photos – just click Places and you’ll be presented with a Google map upon which you can drag your photos.

Google provides a helpful video as well to guide you:

Picasaweb

Not suprisingly, Google provides on-line sharing of your photos at their online Picasa Web site. As you might expect, you can create albums, share albums with your friends and sync your albums with your local – Picasa Web Albums to Picasa. You can find detailed help here for both Picasa and Picasa Web.

Now, do I make the move to Picasa? What do you think? Are you a Picasa user and how does it compare to say Flickr, Smugmug, and others out there? We want to hear from you.