People Recognition is Fun!

People Recognition is the big thing this year with photo organizing software. I have worked with face recognition a little bit in Windows Live Photo Gallery, which can recognize faces in your pictures but does not try to play the who's who game where it matches faces to a name. It's also very slow on my system for some reason. Every time I tag a face, the program becomes unresponsive for several minutes, rendering it unusable for me.

Today I started playing with the new people recognition features in Picasa 3.5, and I am mighty impressed! I started by tagging just 3 recent photos of my husband. Based on those three photos, Picasa then presented me with another collection of 10-15 additional faces it thought could be my husband. I confirmed that they were, and then Picasa presented me with another 30 or so-all of which were successfully identified as my husband. On confirming this batch, I was presented with another batch, and on and on it went until my husband was correctly tagged in 497 photos in a matter of a few minutes.

This was a little scary at first--having all those thumbnail faces staring back at you like some kind of crazy stalker's shrine wall. But it's also very cool, and downright amazing at how accurate it can be. Out of 497 photos of my husband, Picasa did not make one wrong guess, even going back to correctly identify him in 20+ year old high school pictures.

Next I moved on to my niece Molly, who is still a baby. This time I started by only identifying her face in one picture and waited for Picasa's suggestions. Initially, Picasa included pictures of my nephew Johnny in with its suggestions. He's only 6 months away in age from my niece, so this was understandable. I proceeded to tag a couple of pictures of my young nephew and Picasa immediately course-corrected by removing Johnny's pictures from the Molly suggestions. Slick.

Did I mention that the people tags you apply can be synced with your online Picasa Web Albums and your Gmail address book?

I could go on with Picasa's people recognition and probably have all the people in my photos tagged in an hour or two, but I have Photoshop Elements 8 sitting on my desk and people recognition is also one of its new features. I'm going to load that up right now and see how the people recognition compares in these two programs. Stay tuned...