Picasa Analysis

By William Van Winkle, published on October 5, 2009
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: , , | Themes: Software
Contents

20. Picasa Analysis

At this point, we’re officially done with face tagging. Actually, I ended up with nine more tags in Picasa than I did in MediaShow, which tells you something about how subjectivity plays into things. (Today, it was worth tagging; yesterday, it wasn’t.) Picasa seemed to ignore faces that were at too extreme of an angle and totally missed all of my shots that were rotated 90 degrees, so be sure to batch rotate before you start tagging. Other than that, things went very smoothly. If you have a Picasa Web Albums account, make sure that tagging is enabled for it, then click the Sync to Web button to upload your images with their respective tags. Under Tools > Options > Web Albums tab, you can also specify the privacy level you want for your album. You can also have Picasa automatically resample your image sizes (the app defaults to a 1600-pixel resample) and add a watermark.

Explanation: Picasa doesn’t mess up very often, preferring instead to throw everything that isn’t a safe bet into the Unnamed group. Apart from that one dog face, I spotted no tags that weren’t real human faces, and that’s saying something given the average level of this technology today. Overlong analysis speed and an ultimately ordinary auditing process knock Picasa’s total test time up to 45 minutes, which is why we ended up with an overall score of 3.5 instead of 4. That said, Picasa is very easy to use, although I think (not for the first time about Google apps) that it could beef up the thoroughness and step-by-step methodology of its help files. I like having the Picasa viewing and editing tools so tightly integrated with face tagging functions, and the ability to synchronize client-side albums with their online clones is incredibly helpful. And once again, like iPhoto, Picasa is free, which puts a lot more pressure on the likes of CyberLink to justify their price tags.

However. Remember when I said that some things about Google seem too good to be true? Well, nothing in life is really free. Google wants you to sync those photos back to its online service, wants you to share them around, wants you to get so addicted to the social thrill of it all that you won’t mind a bit upon discovering that only the first 1GB of Google storage is free. If you want to upload more photos, it’s $20 for 10GB annually, $75 for 40GB, and so on. (See here for details.) Because of this, I kept my review focused on the desktop experience so as to better match the experience with the other face tagging tools. You can do face tagging strictly through Picasa’s Web interface, and it’s a slightly different experience. Analysis seems to happen instantaneously because of the lag time incurred while uploading. If you find the value in Google’s offering, go for it. Just be sure to weigh feature value versus total dollars before settling on a final tagging product.

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Comments

liemfukliang 10/06/2009 5:29 AM
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Please update more on:
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 :((.

deadlockedworld 10/06/2009 9:23 AM
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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.

testerie 10/06/2009 11:37 AM
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I am giving comment for testing.

Tomsguiderachel 10/06/2009 6:41 PM
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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.

Anonymous 10/06/2009 8:48 PM
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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.

Anonymous 10/07/2009 11:29 AM
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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.

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