Google Picasa 3.5
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: facial, recognition, tagging | Themes: Software
- 1. The Tagging Challenge
- 2. Apple iPhoto ‘09
- 3. Apple iPhoto ‘09: First iPhoto Steps
- 4. Apple iPhoto ‘09: Wrinkles in Faces
- 5. Apple iPhoto ‘09: Funny Faces
- 6. iPhoto Analysis
- 7. CyberLink MediaShow 5
- 8. MediaShow 5: Warning--Wide Load
- 9. MediaShow 5: UI and Criticisms
- 10. MediaShow 5: Criticisms, Cont'd
- 11. MediaShow 5: Analysis
- 12. Face.com Photo Tagger
- 13. Photo Tagger: Opening Accuracy
- 14. Photo Tagger: The Tagging Process
- 15. Photo Tagger: Working With Photo Finder
- 16. Photo Tagger Analysis
- 17. Google Picasa 3.5
- 18. The Picasa Name Game
- 19. Picasa’s No Dog
- 20. Picasa Analysis
- 21. Microsoft Windows Live Photo Gallery
- 22. WLPG: Name On!
- 23. WLPG: Naming, Bonus Round
- 24. WLPG: Analysis
- 25. More on this topic
17. Google Picasa 3.5
Like Facebook, Google also scares me a bit. With each passing year, Google carries an increasingly big stick. I have to laugh at Steve Ballmer’s bravado every time he brushes off Google as a competitor. There are very few things about Google that I don’t like. Every single one of its services I use just impresses the heck out of me—and they’re (nearly) all free. If nothing in life is free, where’s the catch? So you see, I’m a little scared by how excellent and friendly Google is. It’s almost too good to be true.
Enter Picasa 3.5, Google’s latest spin on its photo service, now updated, as of this week, to include face tagging at both the local and Web levels. Once you download Picasa and run it for the first time, it immediately wants to either scour your primary media folders or entire system for pictures and videos. There is no up-front option for only pointing Picasa at a certain target folder you’ve created, such as C:\Vacation Pics. Next, Picasa will ask if you want to make it your default viewer for various photo types. For now, just say no to keep your regular file type settings. You can always change this later.
Now you can get into the actual Picasa interface. If you keep your photos in a custom folder, as I did for this test, you can click the Import button. This will spawn a new Import tab and a pull-down menu for the Import from: field. When you navigate into your target folder, you can either batch select the photos you want to work with or just hit the Import All button to grab everything. Note that Picasa defaults to importing files into the Pictures folder in a subfolder titled by the current date, although you can change this. Initial importing and copying of my 300 files took 1 minute 10 seconds. Once copying finishes, you can hit the Import All button. This populates Picasa’s new folder and starts the face scanning process.
I was shocked at how long Picasa’s analysis engine spent scanning faces. After that first minute of file copying, the program spent another 17 minutes simply performing face analysis. Admittedly, CPU utilization during this time stayed in the 50% to 70% range, so there was no problem with letting it run in the background while working on other tasks. All told, Picasa recognized 485 alleged faces.
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1. let just say I have spend weekly time on a low end pc to get 33 GB photo with so many file. How do I save this tag when I am reinstall windows?
2. About the portabilty in no 1. Picasa has picasa.ini in every folder, but when it corrupt, the picasa.ini is not helpful recovering the weekly time spent.
3. Speed? Why there is no benchmark graph like usual?
4. Try gradiation photos or something similiar. It will see about the acuration.
5. I want to get the best speed, what is the most needed hardware. If Processor will I7 better than C2D? If GPU, will Geforce GTX 295 better than 9800?
I have private paint experience using picasa. I have taging many face in a week of Sempron 2800+ OC to 2 Ghz. When the face recognation is done, for what ever reason, my cpu is dead (dead power electricity). When the electricity power is up, my pc is on windows. The picasa is corrupt. My one week OC is for nothing. DAMN
I recently tagged all my photos with Picasa. I think i personally tagged more than the software did--the software is VERY cautious. It also repeatedly asked to tag posters, even paintings that were on my walls. Finally, it doesn't do well with babies--which is no surprise because they all look the same to me too :-)
Its cool, but im not sure the outcome was worth sitting there tagging hundreds of pictures of ex-girlfriends.
I am giving comment for testing.
Deadlockedworld--you don't have to tag everyone in every album in Picasa--just don't tag albums that have your exes in them. I definitely don't tag everyone in my photos--only those people that are important to me.
Adobe's Photoshop Elements 7 has the ability to detect faces but not automatically match them. It did make tagging much quicker. I could select 40 pictures from a party and tag the lot all at once.
However, I found that there were several pictures that it didn't catch. So, I ended up having to go through the whole bunch manually anyway to catch the stragglers. I found I spent as much time, if not more, making sure I got everything. So, I'm not sure that the "helpful tool" actually did much.
I am using iPhoto '09 and I found that the predictive tagging is getting less and less accurate as the database of tagged faces increases. Impression confirmed by one of my friends using the same app. For example, my wife is probably the most frequent face in my collection and the software has a hard time identifying her. On the other hand, I tagged the face of a friend I see rarely and I was welcomed with 4-5 good matches.