Addicted

I noticed last night that there was a new version of Picasa, 3.6, so I went ahead and installed it. One of the new/expanded features is face recognition. I was mostly curious, as I wondered how good it could really be. The answer? Scary good. And very organized. I typed in about 40 names on faces from pictures (it is hooked into your google address book so it's really easy), and then it just started churning on everything. I understand the technology involved, the product I work on uses things like this in its real-time analytics code. But for a free home product to be this good...well I was surprised.

A few that matches it made that were truly scary good - I labeled about 5 pictures of my niece at ages 3-5, and it started matching pictures of her at 1 or younger. I don't know that a human person would make that connection unless they had known her. So there must be a lot more smarts in there than just "match this face to this face".

Now for me, this is about the best (worst?) possible combination of features given my mild OCD, love of computers, and organizing things. I sit here and it's like a playing a great new video game - label a picture, see what else it matches. Frankly I'm getting WAY too excited about this.

I'll leave you with a picture we just took (no the face matching stuff doesn't do cats!) I thought this one was particularly adorable, Madame Sparkles just loves sitting under the tree.