A few months ago I discovered a feature in one of my favorite graphics applications. The application is Picasa and the new feature is their facial recognition functions.
The Picasa application isn’t really a photo editing tool in my opinion, although it’s got some tools that are nice for the entry-level and home user. What I believe Picasa excels at is organizing and managing your photos and other graphics.
Part of that organization has now become their facial recognition tool. Picasa will start to recognize faces in your photos and then prompt you to tell you who it is. You then tag those photos, similar to how you would in Facebook, and Picasa begins to learn to recognize that same person in other photos.
I was very impressed with how quickly and accurately Picasa was able to accomplish this task. It doesn’t take long to train it, but the more you tweak and adjust, it gets better and better and more accurate.
Now, the next time you need to find a photo with someone in particular, you can go right to it and find exactly what you need.
I wish I could adjust the sensitivity to recognizing the faces though. It will start picking up faces on clothing, billboards and other displays. Perhaps the most frustrating part is when it prompts you to identify all the people in a crowd. That becomes a real big waste of time.
Overall though, I’m very impressed and really enjoying seeing all my photos in a different way now. Organized by person is really interesting.