Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

When I posted about Picasa 3.5's new face recognition feature, the discussion that ensued quickly turned to the fact that Google implemented this feature in a way that severely limits its usefulness. Here's what I said in the Google Picasa Help Forum:

"I absolutely LOVE the way that I can tag faces - Google's technology is really great here - but the fact that the face information isn't saved into the file itself makes this new feature totally useless for a large number of people.

Like many people, I have more than one computer. And like anyone with more than one computer, I want to have all my pictures on all my computers. I use Windows Live Sync to keep my 18,000+ photos in sync across all my computers. I was THRILLED when I saw the face recognition technology in Picasa 3.5, but crushed when I saw how it was implemented. If it was only data stored in the picasa.ini file, I could live with that limitation since the picasa.ini files get synced across my computers. But it's implemented in a combination of picasa.ini files and the Picasa database, so there seems to be ZERO way to make this feature work with a multi-computer system. There might not be appropriate EXIF/IPTC fields for Google to implement this fully inside each photo, but why not make it all part of the picasa.ini files at worst?

And because of that, I'm not going to use this new feature - even though I really want to. Come on Google, you know that more and more people own more than one computer - why design a feature that's limited to people with only a single computer."

There are dozens of other comments from people who are finding the same sort of fault with the implementation of this feature. Google, amazingly, is listening - seriously, it's virtually impossible for me to get a response out of Google for anything, ever - and here's what one of the Picasa team members (I presume that's who this guy is) had to say. Read more...