Google released Picasa 3.5 yesterday with two awesome new features: name tagging and geotagging. The biggest of the two is name tagging which allows you to take on the daunting task of tagging all your friends in all of your photo albums. Picasa 3.5 makes it a cakewalk. Picasa begins the task by scanning through all of your photos. It identifies the faces in your photos and presents them to you, asking you to enter a name. If you are logged in to your Gmail account in the upper-right corner, Picasa retrieves your contact list and allows you to select a contact or add a new person.
Unnamed People
Once you have identified a few faces, Picasa starts matching similar faces in the background and compiles a list of potential matches. A question mark next to a name indicates that there are photos that need to be confirmed or denied as the person. Surprisingly, the success rate is pretty high. I’d say over 90% were correct matches. Picasa allows you to confirm and deny each photo or confirm all potential photos. Since the success rate was so high, I found it easier to deny the one or two matches that were incorrect and hit “Confirm All”. The matches become more accurate with each match you confirm. Photos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums retain your name tags.
Photos Attached to a Person
Picasa has also added a new Google Maps panel that allows you to see pins where your geotagged photos were taken. This is also a welcomed addition since the last version required you to open Google Earth to see this information. It appears that you can also assign a location within Picasa to your photos without geotags.
Geotagging
Both features are great, but the name tagging feature is the real game changer. Adding tags to a photo collection is undoubtedly useful but an extremely time-consuming task. With Picasa 3.5 you will at least be able to begin this process with perhaps the most important component of your photos: the people. Picasa 3.5 puts itself one step ahead of the Facebook process of clicking on faces and selecting names. Perhaps this will encourage more people to post photos on Picasa Web albums instead of Facebook. However, I am sure it will not be long before we see a similar feature on Facebook.
