Picasa has had face recognition since version 3.5. I hadn’t ever really paid attention to this feature until the past weekend. It turns out that it’s pretty neat, despite having some obvious flaws.

I spent about two hours sorting and organizing digital photographs that we have taken over the past seven-plus years. The backup solution I was using consisted of randomly copying photographs to an external drive with no rhyme or reason, at times I remembered to do so. Now that we have a significant photograph collection (14,214 photos) it was time to automate and actually try a bit harder to make sure things were sufficiently backed up.

To do this, I scoured my entire computer trying to find photographs – they were hidden every-which-place. Backups that have propagated from older machines were just kind of copied into newer machines with no regard for location. I have a smallish root disk, on which Picasa is installed, and I’d run out of space from time to time. This required me to move photos to another drive. I’d name it something that obviously made sense at the time of moving – but when I had to go back and actually locate the moved copies, I wondered aloud what past me was thinking.

Then, when we got the eye-fi card, it picked a whole different place to actually upload photos. So, I had to locate all those too.

In older versions of Windows, you’d have the My Pictures/My Photos folder under your My Documents directory. This “My Pictures” directory would belong to the user that was logged on. In Windows 7, you can set up libraries for different media types by pointing it to already existing directories that hold pictures. So, when I select my photo library, it will show me all photos that I have, provided that all photo directories have been added to the library. So I did that – now I can see all the pictures I have in one location, as opposed to having to randomly browse around to see where the hell everything was.

Picasa has the same thing – it will scan for pictures, but only in locations you tell it to scan. I hadn’t messed with any of that – now I have. I now have Picasa scanning our photo library. It took Picasa quite a while to import everything.

This is when I decided to start playing with the facial recognition stuff. When importing, I was trying to figure out why it was taking so dang long. Turns out that while importing, Picasa is scanning each photograph for faces, and putting them into an “Unknown Person” category in their “People” tab, where you can sort photographs by people. It’s kind of neat.

So if you go into the “Unknown Person” hopper and start telling Picasa who certain people are, it makes a unique hopper for each person. So if I tag a photo as being Owen – whom we have one or two photos of – it will re-analyze all the found faces and add anything that might be Owen to his hopper. Here comes the crappy part – I have to go through both of the only photos we have of Owen and filter out all the photos that aren’t Owen. The filter isn’t perfect – yet.

Basically, Picasa thinks that any baby I’ve ever photographed, or have a photograph of – is Owen. So I have to go pick out Alex, Blase, Taylor, Ryan, etcetera. When I pick those out and tell Picasa – yes, these are Owen, I’ve made the facial filter a bit smarter, so it scans again. It suggests that a bunch more people are Owen, with a lot less false positives. Soon, it gets just about everything right, regarding Owen.

The cool thing is that when I eventually get around to tagging a picture as being Blase – it kind of already knows Blase, and does a much better job.

At first, I had around 14,000+ photos to classify, but using this adaptive filter, and about an hour of my time, I’ve whittled it down to 8000 or so photos.

The problems: Picasa can’t handle beards very well, so any picture of anyone that has a beard – to Picasa, you’re were all the same person. That means when I selected Joe – Picasa thought that Jeremy, Kenny, Craig with beard, terrorist me … and anybody else, was Joe. To my surprise, Picasa also selected the many pictures of beardless Joe I have in regards to Joe. Beard sorting took some time.

Picasa finds all faces. For instance, if Anna and I took a photograph in front of our fireplace mantle, on which we have photographs of people – Picasa would find our faces, and the faces in the photographs on the mantle. That’s no big deal until you apply it to public places, like, say parades or baseball games. Picasa picks out all the faces of the random fans in the stands, the folks in the parade, the folks watching the parade, and just about anything else – even and especially the really blurry ones that are hardly in focus. And if those random people are babies or have beards – or are even babies with beards? Picasa doesn’t do well.

The interface for approving/disapproving of the people Picasa suggests as being a particular person is slow and error-prone. I guess in theory if you stay on top of your library, it wouldn’t be so bad. But when going through 2000+ photos of Owen, if you miss one or two, the filter stays a little screwed up and continues to think that eight month old Alex is the same person. Then you have to slog through all the photos of Owen and find the culprits you may have missed.

I’m not done yet, but I like that our photographs are organized and backed up now.