Google Picasa 3.5 Video
Google Picasa 3.5 Video Transcript
>>[background music] Google's photo management app Picasa gets a number of new features in version 3.5 including facial recognition. I'm Jessica Delacourt with CNET taking a first look at Picasa 3.5. Here's how facial recognition works in Picasa. In the Picasa library you'll see a new tab for people in addition to the tab for folders. Picasa scans your hard drive each time it opens, looking for new photos. If thumbnail pictures of the new photos appear, you'll be able to type in the person's name or just ignore them. You'll likely see some repeats but Picasa will eventually group contacts together in a single album devoted to each person. Later you'll be able to find pictures just by finding people. Here are a few tips, Picasa does much better finding faces that stare straight ahead at the lens. We didn't get too many with side angles. You can manually name contacts who slip through the cracks but the process is much smoother if you're signed into your Google account. Google will be able to help you link faces to email addresses. This does double duty as auto film and to make it faster to share albums with the people already in them. If you've used face tagging on Picasa's web albums, you can sync tags by downloading them through the app. Starting from scratch the process takes a while, especially if you have a wealth of photos but if you put in the time you won't be disappointed. After creating albums you can also quickly make a face collage or view the thumbnail pictures in the slide show. A new mapping feature in Picasa 3.5 means you won't have to have Google Earth installed to plot Picasa photos on a map. Just click the new places button, enter a photo's location and drag and drop photos onto the map. Picasa 3.5 also gets smoother importing tools. Now when you import from a device you are able to select individual photos as favorites, choose to upload these photos to your Picasa web album and share with Google groups all at once. Keep in mind that you won't be able to share with individuals from this pane, just with groups you've already created. Picasa has a lot of tools but these were file additions, streamlined photo management, especially the photo recognition treatment. For its next feat we hope Google pays attention to Picasa's slim video offerings. At the very least we'd like to tag people in videos in addition to tagging them in photos. I'm Jessica Delacourt, this has been Picasa 3.5 for Windows and Mac. [music]
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