![]() This time, users get precise control over image placement for example by moving, rotating, and resizing photos, and the software can produce a high-resolution composite for poster-size prints. A new collage mode lets users compile many photos into one composite image.And the tool can automatically fix red-eye problems caused by flash photography.Ī collage mode in Picasa lets users create poster-size collections, sizing and placing each snapshot. A new retouch brush lets people edit out skin blemishes and other trouble spots.A movie maker mode lets people combine photos with music to export movie versions of galleries to watch on a PC or upload to YouTube.The new Picasa software brings several changes: "We're always looking for new ways making sure our users are happy, so it's something we're looking at." Horowitz wouldn't confirm whether a Mac OS X version is anything more than an idea: "Macs are important to us," he said. It works on Windows, though a Google Labs version has been transmogrified to work on Linux via the Wine software layer. Google also plans to release a beta version of the Picasa 3 image-editing. Another is the ability to e-mail photos to the service. It lets people browse by popular tags, location, and peer at recent uploads. One is an "explore" view that lets people browse the total collection of public Picasa photos. There are other changes coming to Picasa Web Albums (though a change to Google Photos isn't one of them, at least right now). The face recognition technology came to Google via its 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision, Horowitz said. Eventually users can click a tag to find shots of a particular subject in their photo collections, Users can label them with a person's name. With the "name tag" feature, which users must specifically enable, Picasa presents groups of images sharing the same face. Picasa users may only tag photos in their own account. Picasa users must specifically enable the name tag feature, and default name tags aren't shared publicly. Knowing the privacy implications of face recognition, Google is proceeding somewhat cautiously. Picasa Web Albums asked me to identify this face it found-actually a mask in a mural (click to enlarge). Too bad I didn't notice the "merge" option until later. I fixed it by telling Picasa my alter egos were erroneously labeled, at which point they re-entered the labeling pool and I assigned them to the remaining identity. The most annoying error was that during the initial period when I was adding names to the system, it somehow came up with three separate versions of me and two versions of my son, despite the fact that I entered the same name and e-mail address. "There are a variety of factors that may limit our success in matching faces, including profile views and challenging lighting conditions like shadows." "Our face-matching technology works best when a person is looking at the camera," Horowitz said. One excusable error: it thought a mask in a mural was a face, though for some reason it didn't bother with a couple of real humans in the same mural. It also thought my bicycle wheel's spokes and wife's ear were faces. The feature failed to find faces in several photos where I thought the faces were reasonably obvious. Picasa's name tags are helpful but imperfect. Picasa Web Albums' most conspicuously erroneous identification of a face, actually the spokes on my bicycle's front wheel. ![]()
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