Mountain View (CA) – Google’s newly released beta of Picasa 3 includes facial recognition that can pluck out people pictures from your virtual piles of photos.  The popular free photo editor and uploader also contains a host of other improvements including screen capture, name tagging and a retouch tool that can make almost anyone look like Jessica Alba.  Just be careful because Picasa’s face recognition could be an evil tool in the hands of your jealous girlfriend or wife.

Picasa beta 3 is a free app you can download here.  The download weighs in at a modest 7.4 megabytes and it really is one piece of a two-part puzzle.  You do all your viewing and photoediting with the desktop Picasa app and then you can upload and organize the pictures online with the PicasaWeb albums.  Just think of it as a Google-based Flickr album with some extra features.

During the install, you’re present with the option to make Picassa your default picture viewer for various file types.  Serious photographers will love this one because the Picasa’s previewer can view almost all .RAW pictures types including Canon’s .CR2 and Adobe’s .DNG format.  Yes, no more opening up Adobe Photoshop or another program just to look at a RAW image.  Not only that, the Picasa picture viewer has many more options than the stock Windows Picture Viewer like showing small thumbnails of other pictures in the folder and instant upload to PicasaWeb albums.

On the first start, Picasa will offer to index all your pictures and videos on the hard drive.  Think real hard before you do this as you’ll start seeing thumbnails of ALL your stuff inside of Picasa.  If you have anything of questionable content, these will show up faster than you can close the lid of your laptop or hit the power switch on the monitor.

Speaking of potentially embarrassing moments, the face recognition can be a bit spooky.  After indexing all your pictures, you can sort them in various ways like by rating, colors (in the experimental section you can sort by red, blue, etc) and finally by faces.  In the filters menu is a “Show only photos with faces” option that performs pretty much as advertised.  After clicking it, I was shown all my people pictures and not a single straggler crept into the mix.  It even grabbed a screenshot of the “Ask a Ninja” page that I took almost a year ago, so I’m guessing it someone detects faces by the eyes and approximate shape of the head.

After sorting all the faces out, you can upload the pictures to the PicasaWeb albums and perform what Google calls “Name Tagging”.  Here you can name the faces and then further sort them out like show me all the pictures of mom and dad, or beth and josh, etc.  According to Google, the face recognition gets better the more you use it.

Ok, so sorting out all the faces sounds cool, but what happens if a jealous girlfriend or wife sits down at your computer.  Seeing all those smiling pictures of women could make for some interesting conversations!

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