Picasa desktop software gets facial recognition

Picasa is one of those amazing programs which packs in the features but leaves out the price tag. The first time you see the desktop software, which is available for Windows and Mac users, it’s hard to believe something this good is free.

The fresh-baked Picasa 3.5 adds more amazement to the mix with facial recognition, geotagging and integration with Google Maps.

Facial recognition is all the rage in photo editing and management software, of course. Google introduced it almost a year ago in the online  Picasa Web Albums site, and now it’s also on the desktop so you can load up locally stored snaps and put a name to every face. You can also tag people from your Google address book.

The software is also smart enough to identify photos which exist on your hard drive as well as an online Picasa Web Album, so if the online snaps have already been tagged that metadata is echoed onto the local file.

Cameras fitted with a GPS, which mostly means cameras built into smartphones, can also add geotagging data and have the photos associated with points on Google Maps. There’s also the facility to work backwards by manually associated photos without GPS data to a specific location on Google Maps.