Picasa Tip: Face Recognition for Pictures in a Folder

With Face Recognition in Picasa, you can work thru identifying all the “Unnamed” people in the People Albums collection or you can go thru one folder at a time and identify just those pictures you want at the time.  This article shows you how to go to the folder and manually identify the faces in any given picture.

So, for example, when I look at the people album for my Dad, Tom, I see that there are only 18 named faces.  I know I have more pictures than that!  If only because I found some old photos once and scanned them all.  I know the folder that contains those scanned pictures of my Dad, now what?

The People Panel

Notice the 4 buttons just below the library on the right side of your screen, those open up a right sidebar or ‘pane.’  You can choose to see information about People, Places, Tags, or Properties.  What you do is open the people pane.  The space on the right side of your screen will now show you any faces that are tagged in the selected picture(s.)  If they aren’t tagged correctly, or not tagged at all, you can fix them here.

There are several possibilities here, the most common are:

1. The person’s face is marked as a face but with no identification. 
   
   
2. Sometimes it won’t be marked as a face at all.  In that case you need to click the button at the bottom, “Add a Person Manually” then draw a rectangle around the face, and Add a Name.
   
3. Yet another option is when Picasa has marked a face, and is suggesting a name, but it hasn’t yet been confirmed.  If the suggested name is the correct person, simply click the green checkmark to confirm.  If it is an incorrect name, click the red X, then enter the correct name.  This should take you back to the first situation where the face is marked but unnamed, so enter the correct name.
   

People Albums

As you find more instances of a person’s face and correctly identify them, you will see those pictures show up in the person’s ‘People Album.’  I found quite a few more pictures of my Dad, so when I look at the People Album section now,  I see:

It is important to realize that these are albums, just like the ‘blue’ albums in the top section of the left sidebar.  If you delete a face from a People Album, you are not deleting the photo, you are just taking it out of the named person’s People Album and dumping it back in the Unnamed album.  You can also simply drag a face from one album to another if you find an incorrectly tagged face.

Brought to you by Geeks on Tour!

There’s a lot more to know about the face recognition feature in Picasa.  We encourage you to read the other articles in this website that refer to face recognition and, if you are a member of the GeeksOnTour.TV website, you should watch the video in the Picasa Special Features series on Face Recognition.