Picasa 3.5

If you’re a photographer (even if you do not take pictures frequently), you definitely need a way to sort your pictures for viewing. Not to forget some pictures that you might have accidentally misplaced! Picasa does the job well, it scans your whole computer (unless specified where exactly to scan) with certain parameters. For i.e. minimum picture size is 100px x 100px. I’ve been using Picasa for a while and I’m satisfied with what I am getting – it allows me to look through my pictures in a timeline easily! If there’s a better program out there that’s free, I might consider jumping ship.

Somehow my copy of Picasa does not automatically updates itself. It was not long ago that I noticed Picasa 3.5 on the website. One of the new feature was face recognition. Hell was I excited! I could now retrieve pictures of people whenever needed instantly! I got it downloaded and installed it.

The face recognition feature is definitely awesome (for starters)! The satisfaction of assigning a name to a face (Picasa groups faces which it computes are similar) and looking at the collection grow. However, satisfaction turned to frustration and boredom. Imagine if you have 30,000 pictures. After a few hours, the scan is still only at 10%. To make matters worse, Picasa’s face recognition feature is also able to recognize faces in the distant background or those that are really blur. I think that if this was fixed, Picasa would be better.

The problem is a pain in the neck when, for example, Picasa successfully detects A’s pixelated and blurry face in the background. The next time around, Picasa will detect another face (not A’s) in a similar manner and thinks that they belong to A. You can however remove the suggestion but it’ll be a good workout for your fingers =]. Also, since Picasa does not look at faces like we do, it also easily confuses faces of two pictures from well taken photographs.

In conclusion, the face recognition feature in Picasa 3.5 is a good add-on but it definitely needs a lot of tweaking. At the end of the day, you yourself are the best face recognition device ever created.

Download Picasa at http://picasa.google.com/.

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