Friday, October 2, 2009

Google-licious

I know it smacks of rapidly trending toward a Big Brother uber-control of all knowledge, but I am an unabashed admirer of and subscriber to a variety of Google-powered technologies. I use Google Voice, Calendar, Blogger, YouTube, and Gmail, among other things. One of their programs that drives most of the new (at least photographic) content on this blog is the freeware picture organizing and editing tool called Picasa. Picasa is a light-weight photo editor but really shines when it comes to displaying and organizing and sharing your photo archive. I even use Picasa Web Albums to share the myriad other photos that don't make the blog cut.

Picasa has just rolled out v3.5 which incorporates an amazing new facial recognition feature. This really is phenomenal - the program will now scan your already well-organized and tagged and geolocated photo collection, pick out faces from the crowd, and help you identify and tag those folks using your Google contacts list. Incredible. So now when you are looking for pictures of, say, Dad - they are just a click away, regardless of what folder or album they are in. Sweet.

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