The many faces of Picasa

We use Google's Picasa to manage, edit, and create with our photos at home. The newest version come with a "face recognition" element. Basically, it looks for faces in your photo collection and then asks you to label them with names. As it finds other pictures that look like the face you've labeled as "bob" it suggests that maybe this is "Bob" and you can confirm or deny. Eventually, it will make it easier to find pictures of "Bob" in your collection. You can make interesting stuff with those found pictures of "Bob" as well.

That's the premise anyway.

Google is a powerful and brilliant company that releases [mostly] great products and feature sets. This one is a little hard to get used to though. As I was working through the bucket of faces to apply names to, my wife walked up and said something along the lines of Amy isn't in that picture, that's a picture of Mary. I thought that I had mislabeled the face. Closer inspection proved that I had labeled it correctly. Amy was in that picture -- actually as a small print in a picture on the wall behind Amy in the picture! Picasa had found a picture within a picture. That was a little strange...

Moving on, though, Picasa's ability to find any face in any picture made it a little hard at times. A little comical at others. It actually "found faces" in baby doll faces and in scanned comic strips, and pictures of Lego creations. But, a word to all other Picasa users... beware of taking pictures at parades, public wave pools, or in rooms covered with family photo collages on the wall! :-) It takes FOREVER to get through those pictures...

We have unearthed a few pictures we forgot we had by going through this process though. it's worth it I think, but can be quite tiring at times as well. And it only does it per profile for some reason, so for now, I'm consolidating my naming activities in my wife's profile since that's where we started, but would be nice to have this as a cross-profile feature. Oh well. Still have 14,000 or so faces to name. Better get going.