For those of you who enjoy storing and sharing your pictures online via Facebook, MySpace, Flickr or the many other photo sharing sites, I strongly encourage you to take a look at the latest update to Google’s Picasa Web Albums. Along with the powerful and free Picasa 3 software for Windows and Mac computers, this site has some incredible technology behind it. I am most impressed at how they have incorporated the acquired technology from Neven Vision with a Name Tag feature. More on that feature later, but first a list of some of the very useful standard features:
- links to images
- privacy settings (make images and albums unlisted or public), control whether they show up in the Google search indexes at images.google.com
- sharing via email
- printing services
- downloading
- tagging
- captions
- support for photos and videos
- geotagging with Google Maps
- integration with blogger.com
- uploads via email
- Creative Commons licensing
- tight integration with Picasa 3 (Windows) application
- integration with IPhoto (Mac) application
- loads of storage with more available via paid upgrades
The special feature: Name Tags with Facial Recognition
In order to use this feature you can click the Try it! button on the right side of the My Photos page and then click the Start Processing photos button; or, you can click the Settings link and click the Turn name tags ON button. After enabling the feature, Picasa Web Albums will start to do image analysis and find what it believes are similar faces in the photo collections. When the analysis is done you’ll have an option to Add name tags. There will be generated groups of similar faces to which you can add name tags and it will allow you to create a name tag and associate it with a current contact from your Gmail address book. Later as you add additonal photos, you can ask Picasa Web Albums to find more faces. Google has a thorough help guide for how the complete process works. If you are familiar with the concept of tagging your friends on social networks, then think of this as the same thing automated for you.
I find this feature incredibly useful and powerful. It quickly lets you sort your collection via a People tab and allows for quick sharing and slideshows. I found the facial recognition to be very accurate and assume it only gets better as you teach it. About the only corrections I had to do was to separate some of the siblings in the photos. (I guess they are related after all!).
I hope this is only the start of how Google will bring their ingenuity to the Picasa Web Albums site. Do you know of any other sites providing facial recognition technology like this? One thing I’d like to see is more of the groups/comments features that sites like flickr provide. What do you think is missing?
Note: This post was originally written in October of 2008. I still use this feature often and wanted to bring it to your attention if you haven’t made use of it already.
