Picasa Rolls Out 3.0 — Now With Facial Recognition 243
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."
App first, site afterwards. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:First (Score:2, Informative)
How do you start the facial recognition feature? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Google Earth integration. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:App first, site afterwards. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [youtube.com]
Re:If you don't like Google doing it you won't lik (Score:1, Informative)
But unlike DHS, Google might manage to make the technology work.
Re:How do you start the facial recognition feature (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How do you start the facial recognition feature (Score:5, Informative)
You have to modify Picasaweb settings to 'English US' then save/ok, go back to settings and now a 'Face tag' prefs exists
Direct download link (Score:5, 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 [google.com]
Re:Please bring out Mac support (Score:3, Informative)
Switching from Picasa to iPhoto was PAINFUL. So painful in fact, that I ditched it all together. I started using Bibble [bibblelabs.com] 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.
Re:Families (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Families (Score:3, Informative)
Re:App first, site afterwards. (Score:3, Informative)
In my opinion it's the best photo management application on Windows or Linux, hands down. From sorting to basic editing and touch-ups it does everything you could want it to, without making a mess of your photo directories.
Re:Please bring out Mac support (Score:1, Informative)
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 of Google's licensing agreements (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Please bring out Mac support (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Oh bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
And 98% of all child sex offenses are by a family member to begin with (which leaves a couple hundred 'real' FUD predator cases)
Re:Please bring out Mac support (Score:5, 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.
Re:App first, site afterwards. (Score:3, Informative)
Irfanview.
That is all.