Picasa 3.5 People Name Tagging

One of the most cool features of Picasa 3.5 is the name tagging feature. What Picasa does is go through all of your pictures, identify faces, tries to group them into similar faces, and lets you name the faces, so that later you can find pictures of specific people easily. As this is something that I used to do manually, using the labels, it is going to save me a lot of time in the future.

I’ve been playing with Picasa 3.5 for a couple of days now, and I’m very impressed with how easy it is to find and tag a large number of faces. I already have 4000 labeled pictures of my son, 3000 of my daughter, and a few thousand of various relatives.

The way it works is very nice. You start identifying people. As you identify more pictures for a certain person, Picasa “learns” this and suggests more pictures of the same person. So, for example, if I identified 300 pictures of my son, I already had 800 suggestions for other pictures of my son. You still have to go through these suggestions manually, as there are misses, but this is done very quickly.

Even today, after I think that most pictures of my son and daughter were identified, when I go through the Unnamed list (of 18,000 faces!), I sometimes find pictures of them, identify them, and afterwards Picasa suggests more pictures of them.

So currently I still have to go through 18,000 faces, to ignore the ones that I don’t care to tag. There are were funny moments too, where I have found faces of statues, a drawing on a shirt, people from scanned DVD covers, a sphinx, and so on. This part is going to take some time to complete. There is no quick way to do this, and the pictures are not grouped in high numbers (usually 2 pictures per thumbnail).

There are other new features too, such as integrated geo-tagging, and Adjust Date and Time, which I believe is new, but so far, People Tagging is the best reason, at least for me, to upgrade to the new version.

How To Share QuickTime Movies

Sorry, no answers here, only frustration. I’ve recently switched my stills camera from Canon to Panasonic. I’m very happy with the the Panasonic (FZ28) when it comes to pictures, but less impressed with the video feature.

The main issue is the video format. Canon saves videos as AVIs, and it is really easy to edit them with Movie Maker to create a WMV files. WMV files are usually small enough to share, and can be viewed on any machine with Windows.

Panasonic however save the movie as MOV (QuickTime). First problem, the videos are very large. Even when saving as a MP4, they are still large. Second problem, they require QuickTime.

I’ve tried various methods to convert the MP4 to WMV, but the best that I was able to produce was twice the size of the MP4, which is already big.

So, I thought I can share on an online video site and embed on my site. However, I would like to keep them private. YouTube offers private videos, but you have to explicitly share them with people, and that’s no good. MSN Videos however enables to share as Hidden, which is good (they won’t come up in search results, but you can link directly to them), but my MP4 files are uploaded in a second, thus not really uploaded at all, and I have no idea why.

So, I’m frustrated now…

Picasa Web Albums People Tagging Experience

Picasa Web Albums have a new feature – Name Tags. All you have to do is enable this feature from the Settings page. Picasa Web will then process your albums and identify people’s faces. That sounded exciting, as I am spending a lot of time tagging my pictures in a photo cataloging software. I had some albums in Picasa Web, so I decided to try this feature.

After a few minutes of progress bar Picasa Web completed the identification stage. It found around 800 faces. Picasa Web will try to identify the same faces and place them in a group, so that you can easily tag several faces at once. For me it worked great for around 120 faces. Afterwards the matching got worse, but still the tagging process is easier than other cataloging software that I previously used.

Picasa Web also caused my son to laugh hysterically a few times, when it placed wrong faces in some groups (for example, a girl from his kindergarten with several pictures of him). There were also a few cases of faces which weren’t faces, and faces which were faces, but not of real people. Here are the top face “failures”:

Psychedelic face:

Foot-face 

Cat jacket face

Puppet face

Airline face

And at number one:

Lego fireman face

My living room in Photosynth

Here is my second try:

 

My first Photosynth!

Photosynth is a really cool technology from Microsoft! I've just created my first one. I photographed the Saitek X52 78 times from different angles, and the result is here:

 

Fireworks photo tips

Lifehacker gives you tips on how to Get Better Fireworks Photos This Fourth of July (or any fireworks holiday...). Sadly I'm reading it too late. I had a great view on a fireworks display site, but a tall building was built between the house and the site, so no more convenient fireworks viewing place for me.