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Picasa Rolls Out 3.0 — Now With Facial Recognition

Posted by timothy on from the face-in-the-crowd dept.

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."

9 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. App first, site afterwards. by FooAtWFU · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

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    1. Re:App first, site afterwards. by E+IS+mC(Square) · · Score: 5, Informative

      And it actually is great tool for managing (and non-destructive basic editing of) your pictures (unless you are a pro and in need of production house pro tools).

      I have been Picasa user even before it was purchased by Google, and it has been pretty good for everything I need to do with my personal pictures (over 20000 now).

      This is a big update - not only face recognition, but a lot of new tools are added or enhanced. Now you can even make/edit movies (basic, but good), which otherwise was view-only till 2.7.

      A good video on new features: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rskC6c_5L1M

  2. Re:Google Earth integration. by cojsl · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can currently manually geotag with Picasa: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=43896

  3. Re:How do you start the facial recognition feature by philgross · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:How do you start the facial recognition feature by wolruf · · Score: 4, Informative

    You have to modify Picasaweb settings to 'English US' then save/ok, go back to settings and now a 'Face tag' prefs exists

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  5. Direct download link by Archimonde · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

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  6. Re:Families by E+IS+mC(Square) · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:Please bring out Mac support by chelsel · · Score: 4, Informative

    I just downloaded the Picasa3 beta and it installs and runs using Darwine http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/ on the Mac.

  8. Re:Please bring out Mac support by NaDrew · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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