The latest update to Picasa 3.5 offers a slew of fixes, updates and some cool new features. Some of the updates fixed the speed of sharpening which was annoyingly slow in the previous version and improved tagging by adding a button at the bottom right hand corner of the screen.
Other updates increased reliability for CD burning and overall stability of the software. Three features stand out in this release: People, Places and Tags.
People
Picasa added face recognition which scans an entire library grouping similar faces together. The process takes awhile depending on the amount of photos in the library. The result is surprisingly accurate. Once a group of faces have been detected, a row of faces will be shown on the left hand side of the screen.
Users can then label them using People Manager. If the person isn’t in People Manager, a new entry can be made or pulled in from Google Contacts which People Manger is tied in with. Adding additional contacts can also be done under People Manager.
Places
Geotagging is simply tagging a photo to a specific location. For example if someone was on vacation and takes a photo at a certain location, the user could place the photo on a map for future reference. Applications are endless with geotagging. Real Estate agents could layout all listings on a map. Hikers could attach photos of landmarks or other items of interest along a trail.
This feature isn’t new to Picasa but the latest release has been updated significantly. Photos can be geotagged in Google Maps within Picasa. To Geotag a photo, users simply click on the Places button at the bottom right corner of the screen, zoom into the location, and drag a photo onto that location. It’s that easy.
Tags
Tags are used in photos for searching. A photo of a father playing catch with his son might have the tags: dad, son, baseball, park, etc. When looking for a photo, the user simply enters one of the tags and a group of photos matching the tag will appear.
Tagging a library of photos can be a daunting task but once a photo is tagged in Picasa it makes searching through thousands of photos much easier. Picasa offers ‘Quick Tags’ to preset a number of words to tag pictures. This saves the user much time retyping similar tags.
These are only a few of the many features found in Picasa. Another Suite101 writer elaborates on other aspects of the software. The updates included in Picasa 3.5 are enough to highly recommend to any photographer looking for great photo management.
