Roughly a year after rolling out facial recognition on its Picasa Web Albums site, Google on Tuesday is introducing an updated version of its Picasa software (for Windows | Mac) that can recognize faces in photos stored on users' computers.

Just as it does on the Web, Picasa scans your photos for faces, then groups together photos of specific people.

Source: CNet

Download (free): Picasa

Thanks - scanning now.

Impressive piece of software. Just finished scanning and selected a photo from the university science day and it pulls the faces out nicely, including a very small one in the back ground.

smart smart

The feature I like most is the "Photo Viewer" which adds a right-click content menu

to your file manager

I thought picasa was good before wow what incredible technology.

Think about this..

Picasa = Google..

So face recognition + tagging = search online images for people..

Hmmm..

Think about this..

Picasa = Google..

So face recognition + tagging = search online images for people..

Hmmm..

I was starting think a little bit scary what could be done with it. Great for personal photos.

Think about this..

Picasa = Google..

So face recognition + tagging = search online images for people..

I was thinking the same and believe they have the tools in place to do it but not sure they will implement it. Here is a textual search engine by them that will return photos of faces based on entered criteria > Google Images

Some information on how the technology works: Technology Review and an older interview with Sebastien Marcel

There are companies/technologies involved in this also including Facebook, Flickr face detection tools. Facebook search and Polar Rose and Photo Finder blog