Family Tech: Google's free Picasa reviewed

In any family, there is always something to spend money on. We try hard to give our kids opportunities to discover their passions and find their talents. All those dance classes, the Internet access, camps and road trips cost money. One way we can free up capital and give them more tools for finding passions and talents is to get away from the mindset that we have to spend a lot of money on software.

There is a ton of free software that is often better than what you can buy. But even when it isn’t, it’s good enough for home use.

And sometimes, free software is cutting edge, even frighteningly so.

Google’s Picasa 3.5 is the latest example. Picasa is free software that helps organize the mass of photos on your computer from your digital camera. And with camera phones improving, we are taking even more photos. When you install Picasa, it scans your hard drive and indexes all your photos.

The most recent 3.5 version is where it gets scary. You’ve seen facial recognition on shows like CSI and NCIS where they take a photo from a surveillance camera and match it in a database of known felons? Picasa now finds the faces in each of your photos. When you identify the face by name, it finds other photos of that person and groups the photos together.

When it was done scanning my hard drive, it said I had over 30,000 faces. After identifying my son in a photo when he was about 17, it found all the photos of him, even identifying photos of him at 18 months accurately. It isn’t perfect; for some reason it had a problem with one phase of his life. I think maybe it was the style of glasses he wore then. And while Picasa was not confident in assigning his identity to those photos, it knew enough to group them with him as maybes and asking me to confirm it was him.

I was especially interested in how well it would do photos of two siblings who have been part of a youth group we’ve been involved in for years. I have photos of both of them going back 10 years. The younger one has always looked very much like her older sister did at the same age. For the most part Picasa has done better than adults who know both girls in telling them apart.

The end product is fascinating. When you choose a person, you see all the photos you have of them. When I click on my son’s name, there are photos from baby pictures to shots taken a week ago.

Picasa makes it easy to share your photos. You can easily create a montage of photos, or e-mail photos, or upload photos to Flickr or Google’s own photo sharing site. You can also make a photo movie of them. I know from experience that one of those movies, with a sound track, makes a compelling little video to go along with a wedding reception, a Boy Scout Eagle ceremony, a graduation, or any event, even a funeral. Check this column’s link site listed below for some examples.

I can see some interesting connections being made because of Picasa’s facial recognition. For example, the software could look at the photo taken of a new friend, and match it to a face in a wedding from 20 years before, and you realize you have crossed paths before.

There’s also a potential dark side. This software is from Google, and Google does Web search. Wouldn’t it be logical for them to take this technology and apply it to photos their search spiders find on the Web?

In the future, you might upload a face to a search engine, and ask it to show you all the photos of that person it finds on the Web. That’s fun when you are searching for photos others may have taken of your kids at summer camp. But what of all the photos that aren’t cute? Will future employers grab a photo as someone waits for a job interview 20 years from now, and in a quick Web search find photos from spring break?

Maybe you might want to keep those truly embarrassing photos of your toddler off the Web. And talk to your teens yet again about the perils of sending around inappropriate photos of themselves.

You can download Picasa at http://picasa.google.com. Mac users’ iPhoto application offers similar facial recognition abilities.

Links for items mentioned in this column can be found at http://bit.ly/FamilyTech. Mark’s blog is at http://markstout.blogspot. com and his e-mail address is markstout@ gmail.com.