Thursday, October 01, 2009

Picasa 3.5

Google's Picasa photo program has been updated to v3.5. PC pro's resident graphics guru Tom Arah is pleasantly surprised by this latest version which offers stunning facial recognition capabilities.

I too, though far less well renowned that Tom Arah can vouch for this as I downloaded it and started the processing of scanning through my rather large photo archive to allow facial recognition and tagging by "people".

It does take a long time. It's been running since early afternoon, and has so far scanned only about 60% of my archive (but it does run to 10GB). Once you've marked a couple of faces, the program basically decides what else looks like that and groups it - but does allow you to confirm it first. It's amazingly accurate and has correctly identified photos of me that are very poor (I don't get ri of much), with various hats on, even ones where I've warped images with special effects!

And of course, it's got all the usual Picasa goodies in it too - and best of all - it's free! Get it here for PC or Mac

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