Picasa facial recognition

I know the Mick & Brian Adventures blog has been a little slow lately. If you check the header - you'll know why. We had a very busy summer, with just enough down time to sit back and relax. We didn't use the grill much that I remember - but the weather here - we can grill anytime. Nicely BBQ'ed burgers in January sound good, don't they?

Something that Google released in early September is interesting to note. I wanted to write about this just about a month ago....but you know. Adventures happen. Just yesterday, we participated in the JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes, here in Portland. We registered at the last minute - and just went and had fun! We walked on a team organized for one of Tegan's friends - Lili. The Team we were on was called Hi Lili Hi Lo - and they have done this for a few years now. Lili was one of the Walk Ambassadors for this event - very exciting! After the walk - we got to ride on the Oak's Park rides all day long! I even discovered that as you get older - you don't have the same ride endurance. I went on about 3 rides too many - and by the time we quit at 4:30 - luckily lunch was four hours past....

So - on to the main topic of this post - facial recognition comes to the impoverished masses!

We have used Picasa to manage all our digital photos - probably since before we got our digital camera, and only had photos sent to us by others. We started using the Picasa Web Albums soon after to share photos of our adventures with all of you. Now - Picasa Web Albums have facial recognition technology!

What does that mean? Well -the Picasa/Google servers look through all our photos that have been uploaded. The software find all the faces that it can recognize - and then starts sorting them by facial characteristics. Once it has finished that - it presents the faces it thinks are the same person to you to identify. It does actually work very well. Now - whenever we upload new photos, it can find our 'classified' faces and tag the photos automatically. Neat!

The first face groupings presented for identification are usually all the same face. Sometimes - interesting things happen. Photos of Tegan and Connor were sometimes grouped together. Sometimes they were at the same age, or shared a similar smile, or Tegan's long hair was up in a hat... Sometimes Connor's nephews were grouped with him, and vice versa. I don't think my face and Mick's were ever mixed together...but I guess we need to be a lot older before we start looking like each other.

Just for fun - I grabbed a most of the shots of me (Brian). Take a look, and see the tough job that the Picasa computers had to deal with. I think they are up and processing again after dealing with this crazy face.

Click on me to see it slightly larger - if you dare.

I really wish this technology was in the Picasa software on our computer, because I don't want to upload our 10,000+ library to Google. Someday - when I get the time - I intend to indentify all the people in our photos. The EXIF tags make this 'easy' to do, if you get the right software. I am still looking for that perfect setup - so I can export data to Excel, enter info there, and then reload the data back into the photos. I did find a freeware program once that did this (Exifer) - but that one is no longer being developed. Something will come along....even if the time to do it doesn't.