In addition to the upcoming beta version of Picasa 3.0 photo-editing software, Google is making some big improvements to the original Picasa.  Face recognition is the most notable feature, as well as some advance tagging features.  User’s can use "name-tags" together with facial recognition features to better organize photos.

The "name tag" feature actually presents users with collections of photos with what it judges to be the same person, then lets them click a button to affix a name.  Once photographic subjects are named, users can browse an album of that individual on the fly, according to CNet.  "Once you’ve started naming people, we’ll start suggesting names for you based on similarity," said Mike Horowitz, Google’s Picasa product manager. "The process of naming people is really addictive and tremendously fun."

It’s a welcomed improvement, but it’s definitely not perfect.  For most photos, it should work just fine, but when lighting isn’t good, or the face isn’t angled properly, it presents a problem.  "Our face-matching technology works best when a person is looking at the camera," Horowitz said. "There are a variety of factors that may limit our success in matching faces, including profile views and challenging lighting conditions like shadows."  Another area that is somewhat limiting, but very necessary, is the the built-in privacy features.  Picasa users must specifically enable the name tag feature, and default name tags aren’t shared publicly. Picasa users may only tag photos in their own account.

I think, like most web-technologies, Google is taking the first steps in what will become a very important staple of online photo-sharing-  meta-tagging.  Photos need to be read, understood, and organized via computers and the web.  To do so, each photo needs to be tagged with various information pertaining to what’s in the photo, and meta-tagging is what accomplishes it.  As the technology improves, and better recognition and auto-tagging features are introduced, it should reduce the time it takes to painstakingly tag each and every photo. 

Related:

Entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 9:17 pm under New Products, Photo editing software.

Read more entries by Justin Montgomery.