Google's Picasa Gets Face ID Update
by Terrence O'Brien, posted Sep 4th 2008 at 12:09PM
The Picasa news was clearly overshadowed by Chrome, but the new features are nonetheless impressive. Most dramatically, Picasa's Web Albums will allow you to tag people in a photo, automatically. Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr may let you tag photos, or people in photos, but they make you do it manually, which can take quite a long time. The revamped Picasa doesn't just search all your photos for faces -- it also compares them and tells you which ones it thinks are the same person, thus allowing you to tag a person in several different photos in one step.
In our brief hands-on, Picasa performed quite admirably, even recognizing a few partially obscured faces correctly. It wasn't perfect and incorrectly identified a few photos and failed to identify others at all, but we were still able to tag an album of 40-plus photos in under 10 minutes.
The Picasa desktop application also picked up a few new features this week, including a movie editor, a touch-up tool for clearing up skin blemishes and red-eye in photos, and a synchronization mode that lets you alter and tag photos in your Web album even if you've uploaded them from somewhere else.
Picasa is getting a little long in the tooth, Google shows it is serious about staying in the digital photo market with these updates. [From: CBS]
