[BigV]

An update on my journey with Picasa.

I continue to use this program as my principal image indexing tool. I also use it for lightweight editing, mostly straightening, exposure corrections, cropping, etc.

But it has a feature I really love and I'm using more and more. As I've said before, I am mostly just a snapshotter, and my favorite subject is people. I won't embarrass myself by calling pictures with faces in them "portraits", they're not. But they do have faces and Picasa knows this. It has a feature called face detection. This is pretty cool. It can scan a photo and pick out the section of the image that (according to its rules) is a face. It has made a couple (out of thousands) of mistakes, but mostly it's pretty "smart". It shows a crop of the face of a given image, resized so the face fills a thumbnail and then gives you a chance to add the photo to a special kind of album called a people album. In a shot that has more than one face, it will detect all the faces, show each of them in a thumbnail, and give you a chance to add that picture to each of the corresponding people albums.

A word about albums. An album is a collection of pictures. In Picasa, albums work like tags. A picture can belong to more than one album by having more than one tag associated with it. When viewing an album, all the pictures in it are selected from the database and shown as a collection. People albums, or People, work just the same. They're albums that have the title of a person's name, containing images that have been detected by Picasa to contain a face.

Back to People and faces. Not only does Picasa have face detection, it also has face *recognition*. This is scary cool. Once you've seeded Picasa's People albums with a few (or more) examples of a given face, it will continue to scan through the library looking for faces that match the ones already associated with a given person. When it finds some it *recognizes* it will suggest them to you. "Do these faces belong in this People album?". It's awesome.

Some of the the things you can do with this is to click on a Person, and see all the pictures that have that person in them. Also, there's a function called Face Movie, where the contents of a People album can be used in a special kind of slide show where the slides are put together in a face aligned movie. Here's a youtube video of Picasa's demo of this function. I think their model looks a bit like little Miss York at the beginning.



At this time, I have 214 People. And I have 18,875 faces detected but not yet categorized. It's a LOT. And it feels like pushing back the tide, but I take bites at it as I go, I think I'm making more forward progress than backward, so I carry on. Here's a typical screenshot of what I am making my way through.

I've circled a couple points of interest. SonofV appears in the blue circles. The red circles identify a couple interesting shots, one is a mask, not really a face, I'll throw that one away. The others show really dark faces in these thumbnails. I can double click on any of the thumbnails and get the whole picture, from which I might be able to recognize the person given the context. And the yellow circle in the upper right surrounds the slider showing how many screensful of this work I have ahead of me. Fun!!