While this is something that would have sounded like science fiction just a decade ago, Picasa 3.5 can now automatically recognize faces in your photographs, and tag them with names!

If you have been using Google's online Picasa Web Albums service for storing your images, you might have noticed that quite a while back, Google added a face recognition feature. Picasa would automatically detect the faces of people in photographs and allow you to associate them with your contacts, so that other photographs you had, or added later would automatically be tagged with their name.

Now using Picasa 3.5 you can do all that on you desktop, without even needing a Google Account! When you install Picasa 3.5, it will scan your computer for images, and will then start looking for facial data in your images.

The initial process can take quite long, even a couple of hours, if you have a large number of photos with a large number of people. However once it is done you will notice that Picasa will automatically show all recognized images containing the same face together.

At this point you can now start associating the faces with names, and Picasa will automatically tag your photos automatically. The desktop version of Picasa, also goes well with the online web version, allowing you to login from the desktop software, and download the recognition data from your online account.

If you usually use you Digital Camera to take shots of your friends and family this will be a huge time saver for organizing your photographs. With minimal effort you will be able to tag and organize your images based on the people in them, a task which would have otherwise required many hours.

So go ahead and download Picasa 3.5 from the Picasa Website

While this is something that would have sounded like science fiction just a decade ago, Picasa 3.5 can now automatically recognize faces in your photographs, and tag them with names!