ComputerNews: Google Picasa 3 beta

With the much hyped release of the new Google Chrome browser, the launch of the new and improved Picasa 3 beta went relatively unnoticed. The newest release from Google contains many improvements.

The best new feature of picasa is the 'name tag' along with the face recognition. You can tag a person in a picture, and picasa, using face recognition techniques, will try to automatically tag all the other pictures of that person in your collection. Needless to say, sometimes picasa makes errors in taggin and sometimes doesn't recognize people at all. But most of the time I tried, picasa was able to get about 65% of the faces correct (You might not get the same results).

With this beta, Google has tried to tie the picasa software to the picasa web albums platform even more tightly. For example, there is a 'sync to web' option which transfers any changes you make to pictures inside the software, to your corresponding web albums pictures. There is another option which allows you to easily post pictures from picasa to your blogger posts (One drawback to this option is the use of an IE window to post the pictures).

Another option is the Geo-tag, which allows you to put pictures on your Google Earth software (Need Google Earth obviously). With this beta, you can now combine your pictures, existing videos and music to create new movies, with relative ease. I would say the new movie maker is as much powerful as the Windows movie maker itself. Picasa has all the photo editing features available in other photo management software like removing red eye, cropping, setting contrast, etc... There is also a nifty photo viewer which can be used to view your pictures from inside the explorer window, instead of the standard Microsoft Image Viewer.

There are many other new features and a lot of improvements to the software. I definitely recommend Picasa to be your standard photo management software (But remember, as with most Google products, this is still in beta).

Grab Picasa 3 beta from here.