I totally love using Google Picasa 3 to manage my photos offline, and the ability to share albums with family and friends via Picasaweb. There is a feature on picasaweb that I'm missing from Picasa 3. Namely Face Tagging.
Is there any way of face tagging pictures in Picasa 3? So that I can have the same functionality as Picasaweb?
This answer on Google Help indicates that this is a feature only available to Picasa Web Albums.
Unfortunatlly no. I wish I could tag local as well, but you have to at present tag what has been uploaded to the web.
Picasa Web Albums does face recognition
With Picasa 3 out of the way, we gave some of Picasa Web Album's new features a run-through to find that they compliment its desktop brethren's experience pretty well, if not awkwardly at times. Easily the most impressive new feature is "Name Tags," which harnesses facial recognition technology to automatically identify people in photos. This makes it easy to, say, keep a running album automatically updated with photos of Cousin Erin or your parents, but this all has to be done on Picasa Web Albums. Picasa 3 does none of this work on the desktop, and doesn't appear to gain any of the advantages of all this automation and facial recognition tagging.
The new Picasa 3.5 contains a facial recognition feature similar to the one already present on Picasa Web Albums, but letting it run over your likely vast collection of assorted photos stashed on your hard drive is a lot more convenient. Picasa creates a new sidebar menu list of "People," and asks you to name the folks it finds in its main "Scanning" menu. If you're signed into Web Albums with a Google account stuffed with contacts, that's pretty easy, actually—just start typing a name, then select the contact that pops up as you type.
Today, I'm happy to announce that we're releasing Picasa 3.5, a new version of our free photo editing software. This version gives you the ability to add name tags to your photos, using the same facial recognition technology that powers name tags on Picasa Web Albums.
They've just released version 3.5 that integrates face tagging into the desktop client.
It's not bad though it can definitely be improved. I found the tools to manage the names a little underdeveloped. I'm also not sure if you can add tags manually to an image or if it restricts you to the detected faces.
On the upside, the face detection works well and fast. It made it through a little over 15k images overnight on my HTPC, now all I have to is add names for all those faces.
