Picasa 3.5 Rewards Procrastinators

I've used a lot of picture apps over the years. Most do the job. They organize, create folders, do small touch ups, and add tags. Picasa has always been amoung the best. Add free and an easy way to upload and share over the web, and I've been using using it as my main stay for years.

One thing I've been meaning to do though is to tag my pictures with the names of who is in them. Now I have no excuse. The new picasa 3.5 adds face recognition. The cool thing is it works. Start by naming a few sample pictures, then let Picasa run through your whole collection. If you are like me, it may take a while to eat through the 10s of thousands of pictures. But it will. I suggest checking in on it every hour or so. Remove the few miss-identified pictures and then confirm all. After a few hundred examples for a face it gets very, very good. It even recognizes a wide age range amoung kids.

Aside from simply being amazing, I was surprised at how much fun it was. It was a real blast to scroll through the dozens than 100s of pictures it found of my son or daughter. Seriously, this technology should not be missed. Get and use it. Amazing.

http://picasa.google.ca/