Google Picasa 3.5 review

It's astonishing

Whilst I agree about the babies thing (it couldn't tell the difference between my two boys when they were similar ages - then again, I had to check the dates the pics were taken) I'd have to disagree about the full-face from the front thing.

It's picked out partial shots and side on shots brilliantly. But most impressively, I took a photo of the boys at an aquarium. It picked out my face in the reflection of the tank - which I had never noticed was there before.

By Bassey1976 on 21 Oct 2009

Maybe....

....you just look like a fish.

By Mark_Thompson on 21 Oct 2009

^^^
LOL

By nicomo on 21 Oct 2009

I did find it picked up a number of faces from photos on the wall in the background of one set of photos.

By simbr on 22 Oct 2009

Picasa's Shortcomings

It's a pity that this review didn't manage to look beyond Picasa's admittedly flashy interface to see some of the shortcomings beneath. For example:

1) Picasa's tagging uses an obsolete standard (IPTC-IIM) instead of the current IPTC Core, which is based on XMP (and which Windows Live Photo Gallery uses).

2) Picasa stores the face recognition information inside its database, which resides on your PC. This makes it a single point of failure, as well as being difficult to share. Other applications (e.g. Windows Live Photo Gallery) use XMP to store the face recognition metadata within the images themselves, making it easier to share the information.

By gcoupe on 23 Oct 2009

Actually started playing with this last night - have to admit its really fun - the face recognition technology is brilliant - I hope they can develop this further so that it may be used for other things, like landscapes that change over time, buildings being built and so fourth.

By nicomo on 24 Oct 2009