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.
Mike Horowitz, product manager for Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, says the facial recognition technology comes to Picasa thanks to the work of Neven Vision, a company Google acquired in August of 2006.
It's not perfect, and it can be funny at times when people so obviously different are paired together. Once you get going, though, Picasa's ability to recognize your friends by name improves to the point of creepiness.
To alleviate privacy concerns, you're able to hop into Picasa's settings and turn name tagging off for shared public albums and unlisted albums by default.
The facial recognition software can be inaccurate at times. It fails to recognize your friends if they're wearing hats or sunglasses, for instance. The best mistakes are when passers-by lurking in the backgrounds of your photos show up in the tagging interface. At its worst, the software will ask you to tag faces in graffiti, paste-ups or advertisements on buses.
An example of an innocent bystander tagged by a moving camera
This isn't the face you're looking for
Even though there are billions of photos hosted on its servers, Picasa Web Albums hasn't seen the same level of success as Flickr. This is primarily due to Flickr's social networking features, and Picasa has taken some steps forward in this department. This latest release integrates Creative Commons licensing options, allowing you more legal power over the pictures you choose to share in Google and Picasa Web Albums image searches. This is a catch-up feature Flickr has had for a while, but nice-to-have nonetheless.
You can share any web album by e-mailing it as a link or embedding it as a slideshow on your website. However, you can't share ownership of an album with a friend or participant. For example, I can share the album of our wedding photos with my wife, but she has to remember the photos are stored under my account and seek me through her contacts. Shouldn't they appear in her albums too?
Unfortunately, Picasa Web Album's previously released full-album downloads feature (into a .zip archive) seems to have disappeared, making it very difficult to download entire albums of photos to your desktop if you don't use Picasa. So even if I wanted to give my wife the online pictures in a bundle so she could upload them to her own site (or Flickr account), I'd have to download them one by one, or install Picasa on her machine. Oh well ...
Accompanying the spruced-up online offering is the new beta of the desktop software component. The new desktop beta of Picasa has also seen some nifty enhancements.
There are a handful of automatic image-enhancement tools like crop, straighten and red-eye removal. All offer one-click fixes for the most common image flaws.
The basic fixes are more than adequate, considering they include some of the most used tune-ups of professional photo editors such as Photoshop.
New to Picasa 3 beta is a way to choose a neutral color (by color picker or auto-pick) which will automatically draw out missing color from your image by balancing the entire image's color palette.
Choosing your neutral color and exploring photo information (including EXIF info) via the histogram.
The image enhancement tools are pretty good at guiding newbies through a typical photo optimization session. For example, Picasa will automatically suggest a way to crop your photos, giving guidance to those who have trouble framing their shots.
A reversion history is built into the editor. Any changes you make can be reverted all at once, or undone one edit at a time. A history feature would be nice, but for lightweight editing, it does just fine.
A new collage feature lets you get creative with photo collection layout. The result is gimmicky, but pretty neat. Scramble all your photos, change their sizes and rotate them with a few clicks and drags, and you have a collage you can print up. Art for your refrigerator, I guess.
Picasa 3 offers no way to browse what you've already uploaded to Picasa Web Albums. You can import a specific album or the entire library straight from the web -- useful if you accidentally nuke your your hard drive or delete your photo collection. You are also given the ability to synchronize any local photo edits to the web version by overwriting your previous upload. Experimental features like uploading via FTP are also a nice touch, allowing you to not have to depend on Picasa Web Albums to store your photos -- a good thing since extra shared storage for your Google account starts at $20/year for 10 gigabytes.
You can tag photos for easier searching, "star" them as favorites and even tag it for display in the screensaver.
The Picasa 3 installation comes packaged with a couple of nifty extras such as a very lightweight Picasa Photo Viewer application and a Google Photos screensaver. The Picasa Photo Viewer is a very nimble way to preview photos from your desktop. It takes a cue from Mac OS X Leopard's Quick Look feature -- double-click on a pic and it will fill your screen with the photo you selected. You'll be able to scroll through other photos in the same folder in a coverflow-like scrollbar. Buttons in the transparent toolbar along the bottom of the screen allow you to open in another application (particularly Picasa) or upload directly to Picasa Web Albums. You can also rotate, head into screenshot mode and so on. In order to get the most from this feature, you'll need to change your mime types so Picasa opens all of your image files, but Picasa offers this option during the installation.
It's best not to compare these solutions with professional editing programs such as Photoshop Professional or even GIMP, but you may consider its lightweight solution as a positive aspect of the software. When you are working on archiving and importing hundreds of photos, you probably don't have the time to edit each one by hand using a professional image editor. Plus, Picasa 3 runs a different ship in regard to its competition. It may not be as powerful as Photoshop Elements, but it packs a heavier punch than, say, Mac's iPhoto or Aperture. However, the other products have Flickr integration, making for a better online solution than Picasa Web Albums.
Picasa 3 beta is for Windows only. A Wine-enabled version of Picasa 2.7 is available for Linux users, and there is no word on the long-awaited version for Mac -- although insiders have confirmed there is one in the works.
Webmonkey editor Michael Calore contributed to this review.
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