The face recognition seems to work best when subjects are facing the camera. The software seems to still have trouble with people's profiles or poor lighting conditions and, unfortunately, its only available for PC. Google's Picasa product manager Mike Horowitz on whether it will be available on OSX said, ""Macs are important to us. We're always looking for new ways making sure our users are happy, so it's something we're looking at."

Here is one image where the face recognition software thought a painting of a face was a real person:



So the technology isn't entirely perfect as of now, but you can try and test it out for yourself. I think its an exciting step towards computers being able to recognize image data, and metadata for photos has just leveled up.

Some other new features for Picasa 3 include:

• A movie maker mode which lets people combine photos with music
• A new retouch brush
• A new collage mode
• A photo viewer for quick slideshows
• Online synchronization

Posted at 04:45PM Sep 02, 2008 by ko maruyama in Enhance  |  Comments[0]