New Google Picasaweb

Today Google, besides releasing the new browser-Chrome, updated picasaweb (the Google online photo service) and  Picasa 3.0 photo manager.  It added several features:
  1. You can explore the world in the picasaweb explore page. (There is a game called - "Where in the World?"  It will ask you where do you think a picture is taken)
  2. You can upload photos by email - you need to turn on the feature in setting.
  3. You can change the license of your pictures
    1. Do not allow reuse (All rights reserved) - default
    2. Allow reuse with attribution (Creative Commons)
      • Allow Remixing
      • Allow Commercial Use
      • Require Share-Alike 
  4. You can "name tags" people in your photo.  
Among the 4, name tagging is the most significant feature.   It will search all of your image for faces.
Once you've added a few names, you'll start seeing suggestions that will help make labeling easy, fast and fun.
We all know how long does it take to tag people in facebook.  With this feature, authors of this page could tag around 200 faces in 100 photos under 15 min.
It took me less than 15 minutes to tag close to 200 faces in a set of more than 100 photos, and that included some start-up time such as figuring out how the system worked, establishing names for various common subjects, and correcting a few errors. The most impressive moments are when Picasa presents a large array of photos with the same face, and you can label them all with a single click.
I tried it out.  I'm impressed by the accuracy of the matches.  If you want to try it.



 

  1. Go to your picasaweb and click on "Try It!" on the right.
  2. Click on "Start processing photos"
  3. It will take some time for Google to scan all your photos and find faces.  (I took over an hour for Google to scan all of my 152 albums)
  4. After the wait, you could start to tag your photos easily.

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