A Taste of Picasa 3

I used to use several photo viewer/manager, most of the time ACDSee and recently FSViewer. Last week I tried Google's freeware Picasa 3 and have a very good feeling.

I have tried previous versions of Picasa and don't like its availability of functions and way of presentation very much. This time I was held by its new "face recognition"  feature. It is very intelligent. It will look up face patterns in photos and group them for you to name them. After training it a while, it can name faces in new photos or ask you to confirm if not confident. You can override if it makes mistakes. Although not 100% correct, the level of accuracy is acceptable and it's a joy to use. More importantly, it prompts me to recognize some old faces and remember some good old days. Now I have trained it to recognize over 70 faces.

The editing functions are marginally sufficient for photo management. A little bit less compared to ACDSee or other similar software but is well presented and easy to use especially for average home user. Some is very well designed such as the "colored B/W filter". The editing steps are stored and the original status of the photo is kept, which can be reverted afterward.

After some learning period, I can live with this new environment and can switch to Photoshop within it when professional editing is needed.

The search function is the strong hand of Google, and exists in Picasa. It search folder name, filename and any piece of information entered in any form, and is very fast. It is a great benefit compared to other softwares, especially when I have 20000 pictures on the harddisk.

In conclusion, I switched to Picasa 3.