Google Adds Face Recognition to Picasa

It was bound to happen eventually, but who expected it from a completely free application? Google has gone ahead and added face recognition to their Picasa application and co-existing web service, which is sure to make handling your large collections a breeze (or so we can hope).

The web service version works by scanning your photo collection to come up with groups of photos that contain the same person. At that point, you can click all that are matches and affix a name, making them easier to search for in the future. Photos added after-the-fact can be added with the same tag, or rescanned to let Picasa find the similar faces.

To take things even further, you can also add tags for location and activities. The privacy issue really piques my interest here. Google won’t only have information of who someone is and where they are located, but they’ll now be able to see what they look like. In some regards, it’s actually kind of scary, but that’s the power that Google has. Steve Rambam said it best, ‘Privacy is Dead’.

My paranoia aside, this feature is sure to make personal collections a lot easier to manage, and I’m almost tempted to download version 3.0 of the software version once it becomes available. There are of course other new features included, so I recommend checking out the blog link below to read about them.

Tagging is a powerful way to sort digital photographs. Photo albums are useful, but with rich tagging, people also can slice and dice their photo collection to show particular people, activities, or locations. Even with face recognition technology or other computer processing, the textual tags in photos are a far more reliable way for computers to understand image content.