So, I gave another try at Picasa after years. I only tested when it had just been released, and at the time I liked ACDSee much better.
Last version surely improved dramatically over the one I had once tried, as expected. It's a very nice piece of software, it's fast, nice and intelligent GUI, etc. So I just adopted once more as my main picture viewer. But this is all "normal" stuff.

There's one thing that just impressed me: face recognition. I mean, it is just scaringly effective. On a collection of 30,000 pictures, ranging from print scans, film scans, early digital compacts, to contemporary reflex ones, it is just finding faces and placing proper names on them. I can tell there's a lot of superb work in defining the recognition algorithm. It is by several orders of magnitude better than what I could ever expect such a small software could do. Tu tell you the truth, I still can't persuade myself that there in fact is some sort of biological signature still evident in a dark and low resolution picture of somebody's face when half covered by long hair, wearing a hat, and having beard, that makes it comparable to that same face shaved, short hair, no hat, in a bright sunny day.
And still, Picasa is getting it right almost always, whether it is sure of a match, or asks for confirmation, or suggests the proper names once you manually try to name a picture.
Of course, distance between the eyes, and the nose, and the mouth... Proportions of them... But to successfully get that piece of info! Wow. What a superb work they did.

Don't you too find that feature shockingly good?

I found it would find a bunch of picture with person x's face but there would be a bunch with person x it didn't find. Then I would identify one of person x and it would identify several more. It does work pretty good especially when you consider that it is free.

Now syncing online and off line albums they still need to work on

I agree, it's pretty incredible. There are other programs like it with face recognition, but from what I've heard it outshines the others in how easy it is to tag people. Apparently that part is fairly difficult with other programs.

But I've had the same experience as you. It found photos of me with and without sunglasses, with no facial hair, with a goatee, with a full beard, and even in four or five different Halloween costumes.

It certainly has trouble as it gets the outlying photos that are particularly difficult to identify, but at least it's quite easy to do manually. The only other time I've found that it's slightly inaccurate is actually pretty amusing. For example, particularly at first it frequently confused my wife for her brother and the other way around. It also confuses her two cousins constantly. It often confuses family members, basically.

Now, I'm not sure you've played with it enough yet, but there's one seriously cool advantage to having this facial recognition. Once you have most of your photos tagged, try the following:

- on the bottom-right of the Picasa window, click the "Show/Hide People Panel" button (it looks like a head and shoulders)
- click on your own album under "People" on the left, so that you're seeing all the photos of you
- looking back to the panel on the right, it shows you all the people who appear in photos with you
- now, one by one, you can click on each person and the center view will change to only show photos with yourself and the people you've selected

You can do this with anyone's face album, of course. It's great when you say "I wonder what photos I have with myself and those two friends of mine." It's seriously cool.

I'm glad you've discovered Picasa again. I'm a huge fan of the application.

*edit*

ps- "having bear" is the strangest Italian expression I've ever heard

See, we do have some in the mountains not far from Rome.

Picasa is still tagging and identifying faces. When done, I'll try what you say.

Face recognition is a very handy feature to have for photo management. Between that and Geotagging, my organization of photos has changed quite a bit. Definitely glad iPhoto added it in the 09 release, and other apps are also adding it.

Face movie in Picassa 3.8 interests me enough to play around with it. Time to see how long it takes to go through my iPhoto library to be able to make one of these for my sisters kids.

That was pretty painless, looks like Picassa reads the iPhoto library pretty cleanly. Current ETA is 2 hours to process all the faces in my photos. Not very multithreaded, but not bad for the collection I have. The amusing thing is that I also let it scan the rest of my pictures folder where I have various wallpapers and such, and it identified this face:

Ok, the Face Movie feature is awesome. Picassa gets to stay on my system for that one feature.

And the face recognition seems to be on par with iPhoto 9, along with the ease of use. I created my own smart album in iPhoto to show untagged faces, but having the unnamed people come stock as it does in Picassa would be helpful for a lot of other users.

Picassa is really impressive to me, and I'd highly recommend it to any of the Windows people here.

I'm quite pissed, but not surprised, that the updates to Lightroom 3 were of an insignificant mangnitude - it's typical Adobe style, just like every version of Photoshop since 3. No Face recognition and no Geotagging capabilities at all in this program. It pains me that both these features were already in iPhoto more than a year prior to LR3's release. They can both be fun fluffy features, but they can also be serious productivity tools, especially when it comes to very large photo collections.

The fact Google software has this feature isn't very surprising since they're all about data acquisition and a number of things can be done with the information gleaned from photos. It does surprise me that Google has managed to roll this into a usable piece of software though - they don't have a track record for producing good software (desktop or web - I still think SketchUp and GMail or horrible from a UI/implementation POV). Lastly, I can't use iPhoto because, frankly it really (really) sucks. Just super bad design and photo management, almost as bad as Aperture.

I just tried the latest Picasa and the face recognition is pretty good. I've managed to break it though as I've got a few shots of very large crowds which are all looking in the direction of the camera. Wonder how you exclude individual photos...

After more than one day of scanny my photo collection, I noticed some glitches (quite few, I have to say) that show some of the current limits of Picasa Face Recognition. I got a plant mistaken for a face, and I got several faces not being recognized at all in the oldest pictures I have, mostly those scanned from prints.
I also noticed that the "Unnamed" section of the "people" folder is not showing many many faces Picasa did instead identify, so that if you click on one individual picture with faces, often there are many recognized as such - Picasa shows them on the right pane and provides suggestions - but not in the "unnamed" folder.
I see now that, because of this, tagging all faces in my photocollection is a huge work and I am afraid I will never complete it. Still, even as it is now, I am having fun and looking through my photo collection in a way I've never done before.

At this point, though, I need to see exactly where all the tagging is saved, and I need to understand how to migrate from one install to the other. While I usually reinstall at every OS change, or less, I just need to know where the stuff is saved on the hdd and how to extract it. I won't feel safe otherwise.
Does anybody know?

Sadly, it seems to me that Picasa does not offer any customization possibility in terms of where to store what, which is a pity in such a nicely designed, elegant, piece of software!

It all seems to be here:
C:\Users\Taym\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2

where I happen to have 2GB of files, some very larghe. By their name one can easily guess they also include all pictures thumbnails.

I wonder how easily this whole dir can be migrated to another PC, for example.

Thank you Tman! That looks promising and very helpful!
Now, I am assuming that, as I was hoping, Picasa just has registry variables one can alter as needed, and PicasaStarter is problably doing that for your with a GUI...

Although I do have around 9000 faces unidentified, that is now down mostly to not knowing who those people are :-) It does group them appropriately.

Amusingly, most of the mistkaes I see Picasa making are obviously genetic (mistaking Claire for her mum, or my son for me)

It ended up with around 6000 unidentified faces here. A large proportion it should know though so its taking forever to slowly go through and identify.

I've got a few photos of very large crowds (approaching 1000) which are all looking up at the camera. It really doesn't like those! It slowed to a crawl and took an hour to process.

One of my friends must have a very generic looking face as it seems to suggest him for nearly everybody!

I have 15000 unnamed in 345 groups. Many I don't know, many I do but can't remember names.
Before, I did not realize I was looking at unnamed gropus and not individual pictures, which is why I thought unnamed folder was not showing all.

I tried out Picasa's face recognition earlier this year. Initially is looked very promising and felt magical.

However after much scanning of my files I realised it was never really going to work. Even after extensive training, telling it who was who, it was still repeatedly failing to identify seemingly nearly identical shots of people as being connected. After 10 days of trying to train it the training work load was unreduced so I gave up and deleted its face database.

I'm mostly seeing that as well. The majority of photos it just isn't doing it correctly. It either doesn't detect a face at all or it thinks it is somebody else.

Yes, as the scan completed with my collection, I am noticing a lot of pictures not tagged when they could have - meaning that they include faces already tagged. Admittedly, they are all quite blurred.

It did also an amazing work with what was in fact recognized, though.

I am going to keep it and update it thoroughly for all new additions, as I am liking the idea of a collection of face-tagged pictures, but I have to give up with most of the older pictures. Even wanting to devote some time to proper tagging, it's definitely too much time.