Picasa Web Albums
:Adds Face Recognition, Map Game
Picasa Web Albums
The Picasa desktop client version 3 has been released with the tons of new changes, and Picasa Web Albums also saw a revamp with new features. For example, now in Picasa desktop client there’s now an Explore tag which lets you visually discover new pics by others.
An interesting new feature that has beed added is Picasa’s face recognition. Google acquired image recognition company Neven Vision a while ago, and now Picasa got some of Neven’s technology embedded on their product. You can easily get started by logging in to Picasa Web Albums and clicking the “Try it†button below the Name Tags headline to the right. This will trigger a job with a progress bar, and you can check back a while later. (At first, none of my test photos seemed to yield matches, but today I’m getting some results.)
Once faces are found, you can easily switch to the People tab and tag them with real names. In my test photos I tagged Matt Cutts, Sergey Brin and others. I then uploaded more photos containing those persons. Google however could not automatically tag them; what they did was find the rectangle within the photo containing a face, and then offered suggestions (sometimes correct, sometimes incorrect), so you’ll end up semi-manually identifying the remaining faces on your album. All in all a useful feature as this lets you group and find your photos by the persons in them, but it would become even more useful if Google were able to automatically assign matches and tag the pictures for the users.
Another addition to Picasa Web Albums is a game called “Where in the World?â€. Here your job is to try to guess where a given snapshot was taken by clicking on a world map. You’ll then see the distance to the actual location and get more points if you pick a location that is closer to the actual location. The game looks neat but it would probably be even more interesting if they’d more often show you pictures for which there’s a realistic chance to know the location (e.g. a picture of a famous monument versus a picture of a more general shore scenery). So What do you guys think?
