Great, Now Google Knows What I Look Like
September 22nd, 2008I just spent the last few minutes applying name tags to the pictures in my Picasa Web Albums collection, and now Google knows exactly what I look like.
Picasa Web Albums is the online arm of Google’s Picasa photo organization program, widely recognized as the best photo management application in terms of speed and features. My usage of Picasa has been restricted to the web albums feature (which comes with 1GB of free storage), since I have been using iPhoto on the Macintosh — Google does not currently provide a port of Picasa for OS X (it has been promised for over two years now, but is rumored to be launched ‘later this year‘).
Back on topic, Google recently updated both the web and desktop versions of Picasa and added a new people-tagging feature. The feature is a big step beyond a similar tool offered by Facebook, in that Google automatically attempts to identify faces in your pictures automatically (Facebook requires you to manually click on every face in each picture). Once the person tagging feature has been enabled, Picasa takes a few minutes to recognize faces from all your pictures (depends on the number of pictures available, of course). The face recognition works amazingly well, and the system does a good job of grouping multiple pictures of the same person together. Once done, a user-friendly slider interface allows you to name each person that Picasa found in all of your pictures. This drastically cuts down on the time that would otherwise be required to perform a similar exercise manually.
So, what are the advantages of name tagging your pictures? For one, it makes it easier to search for all pictures that include a particular person, in your collection. This can be a daunting task with even a small collection of photos, and especially so if you have a lot of group snaps.
Another feature of this system, good or bad, is that Picasa links the tagged pictures of a particular person to the profile of that person in your Google contacts list. Therefore, tags are not just a label, but cross-linked with Google profiles. This would translate to photo management benefits across all Google services that are tied in to these profiles, especially social network websites like Orkut. This is not unique to Google’s Picasa, as Facebook handles tagging the same way, creating cross-links to profiles that match tagged pictures.
