Sunday, January 10, 2010

My Current Preoccupation: Face Tagging on Picasa

I haven't played Mumu all weekend. Why? I'm too busy identifying faces in my digital photos with Picasa.

It's addictive. First Picasa looked at all the photos on my hard drive. Then it spotted most of the faces. Then I told it who some of the faces were. Then it started guessing at matching faces. That's when it became obsessive.

What's especially fun is when it guesses wrong, but is weirdly close. Like when it thinks Manon is her mom or one of her sons.

There's a quick intro to Picasa 3.6 and its face recognition at MakeUseof.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...
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RealGrouchy said...

...looks like you could use comment moderation or CAPTCHAs...

I was rather pissed after tagging all my faces in after upgrading to Picasa 3.5 to discover that Picasa assumes that you only ever want to look at photos of people.

This is annoying as all hell for me, because most of the time I'm looking for photos of stuff, places, or buildings. Now whenever I search for something, I have to scroll through all the faces of people I don't want to look at, and there's no way of turning it off without destroying all the effort that went into tagging them in the first place.

Also a privacy issue when you're using Picasa on your laptop in a public place or trying to find a picture of something with a (non-close) friend looking over your shoulder. Start typing and the faces of people with the first letter will appear in the search results.

And most of my photos are old, anyway. You go on one trip in high school and you have to look at the faces of a bunch of kids you didn't know (not to mention all the "unrecognized" Chinese people!) for the rest of your life!

- RG>

David Scrimshaw said...

Hi RG,

I've been using the "x" feature to tell it to ignore faces that I don't know.

And I don't laptop.

But I bet I'll have plenty of frustrations to recount soon enought.

(Already for example, the "Add a Person Manually" button isn't available when you're in the "People" section. You have to look at a photo in the "Folders" section to get it.)

punkersdanielle said...

That's great! Oh no, I don't need a new obsession... I've got to finish my other ridiculous projects... :-)