Google Picasa 3 sports facial recognition

Speaking of potentially embarrassing moments, the face recognition can be a bit spooky. After indexing all your pictures, you can sort them in various ways like by rating, colors (in the experimental section you can sort by red, blue, etc) and finally by faces. In the filters menu is a “Show only photos with faces” option that performs pretty much as advertised. After clicking it, I was shown all my people pictures and not a single straggler crept into the mix. It even grabbed a screenshot of the “Ask a Ninja” page that I took almost a year ago, so I’m guessing it someone detects faces by the eyes and approximate shape of the head.

After sorting all the faces out, you can upload the pictures to the PicasaWeb albums and perform what Google calls “Name Tagging”. Here you can name the faces and then further sort them out like show me all the pictures of mom and dad, or beth and josh, etc. According to Google, the face recognition gets better the more you use it.