19. Picasa’s No Dog

All told, it took about one minute to exhaust all of the hits for my four subjects and amass 112 correct tags before Picasa ran out of suggestions. That part sounds great. Less encouraging is the realization that this only represents 23% of all faces identified during the initial scan. At this point, I highlighted Unnamed to bring up the remaining 373 faces. You can batch select Unnamed faces and collectively ignore them, but because Picasa can run as a local application, clicking the X symbol in the top-right of each face box to ignore goes away as quickly as batch selection. I found that as one Unnamed group is exhausted, another quickly comes up to replace it. Also, as you use the auto-fill menus to complete names for the people you want to tag, Picasa starts adding more suggestions to your recognized People albums. This can create a lot of back-and-forth between the Unnamed and recognized People albums, and you’ll just have to experiment with whether you’re willing to do this or just plough through the Unnamed faces from start to finish. I opted for the latter approach because I dislike feeling interrupted.

Unlike several competitors, Picasa didn’t generate a bunch of false tags by confusing objects for faces. I did get one hit on a dog’s face, but no inanimate objects, which is very encouraging. I also noticed that Picasa picked up faces often ignored by rival apps.

It took me 12 minutes to go from writing in the first name to finishing off the Unnamed collection. When done with this, I found I had the following accounted for: Me, 34 of 45; Devon 98 of 117); Garrett 80 of 93; and Knico, 34 of 43. That’s pretty good, but there were still a lot of missing faces. Not even Picasa gets you out of the auditing stage.

To start auditing, click on your folder, then double-click on the first image in the album. This brings up Picasa’s editor. If you mouse-over faces in the picture, you’ll see the usual tag box with a name under it. Along the right side of the UI, Picasa shows you the representative face thumbnails for the people tagged in the photo. I wish Picasa had used the actual faces shown in the photo as the thumbnails, but I can see arguments for doing it both ways. (For instance, it might be handy to have a current thumbnail of a person when you’re seeing his or her baby pictures.) Not immediately seeing the tag boxes on-screen means you have to pay a little more attention and match what you see in the full image against the thumbnails on the right. More thinking means more time.

The left and right arrows at the top of the editing module help you move through the album. When you find an image that’s missing a tag, use the Add a person manually button at the bottom of the People bar on the right to create a tag, resize it, drag it over your target’s face, then apply the name. From start to finish, auding/editing with Picasa took me 15 minutes.