Google Picasa 3.5

The third tab, People, is the most impressive by far. Leave Picasa 3.5 open overnight and it will get to work analysing your photos, pulling out and identifying faces. Next morning it will present a selection of faces organised into expandable groups. If a face is of someone important to you, simply type in that person's name to create a face tag. This appears as an album in a new People section in the left-hand navigation panel. Leave Picasa to work again and, when you next click on your face tag, you’ll find a selection of suggested matches you can quickly dismiss or confirm.

The big question is how good is the recognition? The answer is astonishingly good, at least for adults. Working through a collection of 60,000 images, Picasa 3.5 identified over 500 shots of one person without making a single false suggestion. Unfortunately, the hit rate falls quickly for children and especially babies, but that's hardly surprising as their faces have fewer distinct features and change significantly over time. Even with the lower accuracy, however, you can quickly work through hundreds of suggestions and even enjoy the process.

It's important not to get the wrong idea about what Picasa 3.5's face tagging can do. Google's technology is stunning but face identification is never going to be perfect. It can only try to work on clearly recognisable, more-or-less full-on faces, which are generally the exception rather than the rule. In short, Picasa 3.5 can’t automatically find every picture in which a particular person appears.

Instead, what face tagging offers is a reasonable and useful stab at people recognition for those users who accept that they’re never going to have the time or inclination to work through their entire collection manually tagging every photo. More than this, face tagging offers a completely new entry route to your photos.

Last month we looked at Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 and its new face tagging system and came away unconvinced. With Picasa 3.5 we've been completely converted. That's partly down to the fact that Google's face identification and matching are far more accurate than Adobe's, but the major difference is the overall approach. With Elements 8 face tagging feels like another image-handling chore; with Picasa 3.5 it's fast and fun.

While its editing capabilities are comparatively limited, thanks to its live search, web albums and simple new map referencing and face tagging, Google Picasa 3.5 is the best choice available to help you master your digital photos and, more importantly, to enjoy them. And the fact that it's free is a major bonus.

Author: Tom Arah