Last week’s announcement of the new Google Chrome web browser overshadowed another new release from Google: Picasa 3.0. This new Picasa is a major technology upgrade to both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, and digital happy snappers out there have every right to be excited about the new features.
The first nifty feature is new facial recognition technology, which allows you to identify people in your pictures. Once you tag them and start uploading more pictures, Picasa is able to suggest tags for people based on the similarity between their face in the picture and your previous tags. Very MI6.
Picasa now also features an Explore Page which displays the most popular public photos uploaded by members. The photos are displayed in a 3 X 4 grid making it very clear to navigate and also shows the latest uploaded photos in a slide-show widget. If you’re not sure where to start, it also provides a list of the most popular tags.
This may sound a touch mundane, but just take a look at the Explore Page and you’ll instantly get a sense of the photographic talent from people all around the world. It is this ability for anyone, not just professionals, to show off their skills that makes this feature important. There is even a “Where in the World?” game, which shows you a photo for you to guess where it was taken. If you answer “Cairo” instead of “Sydney”, it not only tells you that you’re wrong, but also informs you how far off you were in kilometers, just to make you feel extra dense! Unfortunately you can be faced with identifying the geographical location of a plate of food, which, let’s be honest, isn’t playing fair.
There is also an added video editing feature, a screen capture feature and a new easy sync to web function so that any edits you make to photos in Picasa are automatically transferred to your corresponding online albums. These new Picasa features really allow for more people to discover and interact with public photos, meaning that Picasa is really starting to mount a serious challenge to Facebook Photos, Flickr and Photobucket in the online album world.
Source: TechCrunch, Google