Slashdot Mirror
Picasa Rolls Out 3.0 — Now With Facial Recognition
eldavojohn writes "If you use Picasa (Google's photo sharing site), they have upgraded to 3.0 and are purportedly offering facial recognition. That's right, why tag photos of your friends when the software will group similar faces together for you? There's a new list of features including repairing old photographs by touching them up and even writing on your images. As expected, not everyone is 'ok' with Google automatically recognizing you in pictures."
Google's Picasa is a photo-manipulation application that you download to your computer and install so you can manipulate images. It includes the capability of uploading those files to PicasaWeb, which is actually the photo-sharing site...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Zero factorial is one.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
How do you try this feature out? I RTFA, WVFYTV (*** you tube video), read the new feature page (which as far as I can see, doesn't mention this feature), did a few searches on the feature, then installed picasa 3 and fiddled with tagging photos, but no tag suggestions have come up. Can someone please enlighten me as to how this works?
You can currently manually geotag with Picasa: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=43896
But unlike DHS, Google might manage to make the technology work.
Picasaweb (Google's photo-sharing website) does the facial recognition, not the Picasa application. On the Picasaweb site, you can opt-in to the facial recognition stuff, and it will bulk process your uploaded photos. To use it you have upload some photos to the web first, using the Picasa app.
You have to modify Picasaweb settings to 'English US' then save/ok, go back to settings and now a 'Face tag' prefs exists
wolruf@gmail.com
As there are no valid links in any of the pages linked in the story, I managed to find one manually:
http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa3-setup.exe
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
Switching from Picasa to iPhoto was PAINFUL. So painful in fact, that I ditched it all together. I started using Bibble on the mac. It's much more powerful and way less limited. It's mostly designed for processing RAW photos, but works well with jpegs too. It does crash every six or seven seconds though.
I really miss the watch feature and the time-line feature. That was by far one of the coolest photo organization tools I've ever seen. I wish google would get on it and release Picasa for the mac too.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Er... I too thought this was a feature of Picasa (desktop), but the summary is really really bad and misleading - the feature is actually in Picasa Web.
You do not have to do anything if you already have pictures uploaded there - just enable the option in the new updated user interface (this option is not on by default), it may be a while your pictures are scanned (23 mins for me), and then you will be able to start playing with faces and tags.
And here is video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teeGF-w5Cpw
If you have an Intel Mac you can run get Picasa/Wine through MacPorts. It runs just fine on my Mac like that (The official Linux version itself is repackaged with Wine, you can run the same one on OSX)
Beware the EULA for Chrome in which Google claims rights to all your content, including picasa posts: 11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/03/google_chrome_eula_sucks/
I just downloaded the Picasa3 beta and it installs and runs using Darwine http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/ on the Mac.
And 98% of all child sex offenses are by a family member to begin with (which leaves a couple hundred 'real' FUD predator cases)
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
To Mac. I've installed Darwine and was able to run the Picasa/Win installer and it even launched, but dies when I try to find photos to catalog.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE