Google's Picasa: Now With Facial Recognition Software

Google recently announced the release of the beta version of Picasa 3.0, Google's photo management software, on Google's photo blog.

Google is also launching a redesigned version of its Picasa Web Albums. Picasa 3.0 software and Picasa Web Albums are now much more integrated and easier to coordinate between, with new functionality for quicker photo uploads and a "Sync To Web" function that automatically updates Picasa Web Albums when users edit photos with the Picasa 3.0 software.

But the single feature that's giving bloggers something to talk about is Picasa 3.0's new "name tags" function. The "name tags" feature incorporates face recognition technology and automatically groups photos with similar faces together.

"Instead of asking you to painstakingly label pictures one-by-one, 'name tags' lets you rapidly tag many photos at once," said Mike Horowitz, a product manager at Google, in a statement. "By doing so, you can easily find that photo of your cousin from two years ago; create a slideshow of you and your best friend, or share an album with everybody who appears in the photos."

The new photo recognition software integrated into Picasa comes from Google's 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision.

"Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo," said Adrian Graham, Picasa Product Manager, in an Aug. 15, 2006 post on the official Google blog. "It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects."

Currently only the Windows version of the Picasa 3.0 software is available.