Picasaweb’s Name Tags rocks

Today I was uploading some of the pics taken during a marriage into picasaweb and just now I found out that there was something new in picasaweb called Name Tags. I tried out the face detection in Picasa 3 but wasn’t very impressed with it.

But when I tried the name tags, it automatically detected most of the faces and also grouped together most of the people together. All I had to do was to click on the “Setting” link in picasaweb and had to click the Turn name tags ON button. It does some processing (which is blazingly fast) and presents you a film strip to view the different faces and assign them names from either your contact list or new names on the fly.

Even if some of the faces are missed, you can add them when you view the individual photo. Very easy to use interface for organising the world’s information. I wish all the applications (online/offline) were this easy to use. I should also remember this while developing my applications.

Here are some reasons why this will be a huge hit:

People like to look at old photographs and try to remember everyone’s names. It is fun to do during a sunday afternoon with your family
Google does most of the initial work for you. Though not very accurate, it does help a lot. Also as you keep updating the photos, it tries to guess the name of the persons in the photo automatically.
The interface can’t be easier than this. Facebook has such a technique, Flickr also allows you to tag parts of your images. But automatically marking up the images are so easy.
I found one pic in which I was present which I didn’t know till that point. You could easily identify who were all in a particular event by allowing google to match the faces.

However it all depends on the number of people who use picasa. I find that flickr still holds the number 1 position in image uploading services. Google needs to do some serious marketing for picasa and should also open up some APIs for the other services to upload pictures through it.

Now all google has to do is wait for a few years and let people tag the photos and get a huge collection of people’s images and their names which can be used by Big Brother to rule the entire world. Simple. You also get a report of who was with whom at what time. Easy way to identify your friends when you are gone into hiding after committing a thought crime.

I am going to start using picasaweb for all of my images - would probably need a storage upgrade sometime later.