Comments on: Google Picasa 3.5: First Look – Wow

By: Reg

Reg — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:22:30 +0000

Ah I think that I’ve cracked this. As face detection is set on by default, as soon as you run the new version it starts scanning. Even if you go to options and disable face detection it is too late as it completes the scan and sets up the People “folder”. What I’ve done is to set folder manager to select no picture folders, install the update, deselect face detection and then use folder manager to select my picture folders. Result is no face scanning and no People “folder”.

By: Reg

Reg — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:09:06 +0000

I couldn’t stop it scanning all my pictures for faces. I could live with the facility if you could do that and hide or delete the People “folder”.

By: Tom Arah

Tom Arah — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:16:14 +0000

You can switch off face detection and suggestions and manage thresholds under Tools > Options.

As an update after my initial trial I decided to look at my full collection of some 60,000 images.

Again for adults it was brilliant eg finding almost 600 images of me without any errors.

I think that must be because I don’t look like any of my friends and because I haven’t changed much over the last ten years.

The work involved sorting out the images of my twins and especially their younger cousins was vastly more work as they look more similar and they change markedly over time (in retrospect I think I would have been better off having different tags for different ages especially for babies).

Even so it took me a few hours to categorize around 10,000 suggestions which I think was well worth the effort.

As I said in the post it’s not comprehensive recognition of every person in every image – if you want that you’re going to have to manually tag every image. What it offers instead is a different way in to your images based on what people are most interested in ie full-on faces.

With 10,000 suggested faces categorized I’m now perfectly happy to leave the other 10,000 as unnamed, to deal with the new suggestions Picasa makes when I add new images, and to get on with my life.

By: Reg

Reg — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:31:21 +0000

Neither am I very keen on this innovation. I’ve gone back to the previous version of Picasa hoping that in the next version this feature will be optional and can be switched off.

By: JohnAHind

JohnAHind — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:04:07 +0000

Am I the only one chilled to the bone by this technology and the fact it is Google with it? Imagine the privacy implications of this applied to really large collections of images and video like Flickr and Youtube – imagine it applied to all the surveillance cameras about the place!

By: NellieIrrelevant

NellieIrrelevant — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:03:45 +0000

Leave it to search fully? I left it running all last weekend! Don’t know what you mean by deleting the tag, but somehow I suspect the software doesn’t function as well when the databases are very very large.

By: HK

HK — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:48:21 +0000

This has worked pretty well for me too, although it does seem a good idea to leave it to search fully before starting. You can then first tag the most common ones (which appear to be listed first) which will hopefully account for most of the photos, if not most of the 1000s of faces it will pick up. You may get better luck with ignoring by actually deleting the tag rather than ignoring the face.

By: Jamesyld

Jamesyld — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:29:07 +0000

re: NellieIrrelevant
I wonder if the ignore face option only ignores that instance of the face, rather than using it to build a ‘pattern’ to ignore globally.
Maybe they should have two ignore options, ‘ignore once’ and ‘ignore always’.

I must admit most of my photos don’t have many unknown people in, just friends and family so that wasn’t much of an issue for me. Maybe they’ll sort it out in version 4.

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:23:02 +0000

When apple announced face recog on iPhoto and mentioned that it wouldn’t work on dogs, I asked if it worked on Michael Jackson (then, still around)… they all developed that slightly puckered look that presenters get when threatened with the giggles!

By: NellieIrrelevant

NellieIrrelevant — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:04:38 +0000

Much as I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, I’m less overjoyed by Picasa 3.5. I have lots of photos of my sons’ rugby matches and Picasa listed 16,000 faces as ‘unnamed’. That’s fine, I thought, working steadily through the faces of strangers and telling Picasa to ‘ignore’ them. The trouble is, Picasa doesn’t. No matter how many times I tell it to ignore a face the same ones keep popping up again as suggested matches asking to be confirmed. It’s almost impossible to make any progress because you’re constantly dismissing faces you’d dismissed twenty times already, knowing deep down they’ll only pop up somewhere else shortly.

And when you have that many faces available, believe me, it comes up with some very odd matches. Few people would suggest my silver-haired mother of 94 resembles a sweaty 15-year-old kid wearing a helmet and chewing on a gumshield, but Picasa does. I suppose I could tolerate that if the ‘ignore face’ button actually worked… but it don’t…