Roughly a year after rolling out facial recognition on its Picasa Web Albums site, Google on Tuesday is introducing an updated version of its Picasa software (for Windows | Mac) that can recognize faces in photos stored on users' computers.
Just as it does on the Web, Picasa scans your photos for faces, then groups together photos of specific people. It's then your job to tell it who they are as well as confirm its guesses. If someone you're tagging is in your Google address book, you can also look them up very quickly with auto-complete. Otherwise, Google gives you the option to add them as someone new; this information then gets synced back up your Google address book.
Picasa's software can now scan for faces, and offer up recommendations of people it thinks are your contacts.
(Credit: CNET)The system worked very well for me, but it was slow going. I had to leave the program running overnight for it to finish processing my 3,700 or so photos for faces. It also had my processor humming, since it was doing all the work on my machine instead of Google's giant server farm.
That's not to say Google hasn't included a few things to help speed up the process. For one, if you've got photos that are both hosted online and on your hard drive--and that have already been scanned for faces, the Picasa software can grab that information and add it to your local library. This saves it from having to scan the same photos twice.
And for photos it thinks contain people you've verified as contacts, it gives you quick "yes" and "no" buttons that can add or reject name tags. Oftentimes, clicking "yes" adds a few more suggestions for photos of that person that the program feels is safe enough to recommend. There's also a way to group accept or group decline its suggestions, which saves time you would have otherwise spent clicking the buttons one at a time.
... Read moreApple updates its popular production suite, iLife, that aims to corral your video, photo, music, and Web needs inside one big fence.
Facebook compatibility, facial recognition algorithms, advanced editing features, and music lessons from the stars are just some of the improvements made to iVideo, iPhoto, GarageBand, and iWeb. Check out what's new in this First Look video. We've also got a slide show with even more iLife '09 goodness, and an in-depth review for iWork, Apple's productivity suite.
Update: I mistakenly said this tool does two-way sync. PhotoCopy currently only moves photos one direction--from iPhoto to Flickr.
Having recently picked up one of the new MacBooks, I've been spending the last few days getting it up to speed with all my Web services and prior storage backups.
One of the biggest hurdles I'm trying to overcome is being too reliant on software, which is considerably easier with today's cloud services.
One that caught my eye on this front is PhotoCopy from 24x7 Digital. This $20 software program, which is Mac-only, hooks up with your iPhoto library and Flickr account, and will keep your Flickr photos synced up with those on your machine--sans any manual uploading on your part. The big idea here is that any changes made on your machine will be quietly handled in the background; this includes rearranging, edits, renaming, and deletion.
This certainly isn't a new idea, but it's a smart one. The latest iteration of Picasa does two-way sync with your Picasa Web albums, which can be a great way to restore a huge photo collection, if your hard drive goes kaput. Hopefully, future versions will do two-way sync, and support Apple's higher-end photo management tool, Aperture, along with other Web photo hosts.
Note: If you were planning to use the PhotoCopy free 30-day trial, it adds a watermark to each synced-up image until you've registered, so be careful.
[via Macworld]
You can pick which iPhoto albums you want synced up. The tool also lets you pick a resizing level, in case you don't want to upload giant versions of your professional shots.
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