Picasa Web Albums – Face Recognition
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Google is super hot this week. After Google Chrome , its a revamped version of Picasa Web Albums with Name tags aided with Face Recognition. A new beta version of Picasa 3 is also out now.
Name Tags is a feature by which Picasa Web Album automatically scans our photos and identifies “Faces”in the photos.
To activate this, you need to specifically opt for this service.First click Try it! from the right side menu in My Photos Page. And click “Start Processing Photos”. You can also enable/disable this feature from the Settings Menu.Or if you failed to find these options, you can also start from here : Get Started with Name Tags.
Picasa Scanning for Faces
After you enable name tags, Picasa Web Albums will look for similar faces in your photo collection. This process will take some time to complete depending upon the number of photos/faces in photos in your album. My Picasa Web Album with around 440MB of photos showed near 1 hour to complete scanning. But it was finished within 30 Minutes.
After Picasa identifies all the faces in your photos, the job is now yours to tag them with Names. Picasa will displays a list of faces which ‘it’ thinks as of a same person. It works well as in most cases, Picasa tries to pick up correctlty.
We have to type in name, and if the contact is in our Gmail Address book , details will be shown like email id and nick name.But some times, Picasa tries to group wrong faces as in this example,
Picasa Grouping wrong faces
Here, we have to uncheck the wrong ones and continue tagging.
Sometimes, if Picasa thinks that the group of faces listed is of the same one we have already tagged, it will displays it as a suggestion.
Picasa Web Album : Suggestions
Clicking on it will tag it with the same name. The Choose button is for selecting names from our gmail Address Book.
In my case, picasa identified around 2000 Faces! Thats from some 1000 photos. Tagging all is a tiring process. But anyway , new photos added to the album will be tagged with existing Name tags or we can add more. So in long run , it will be a good idea to keep all your photos tagged.
Google have any plan to produce people search results from Picasa Name Tags? We have to wait and see.
thanks