Face matching in Picasa / LR

Hi,

I am not sure how many people here have tried/used the latest version of Google Picasa. It has a new technology which performs face recognition to make name tagging quicker. I have tried it and it seems to work great. I wonder if LR will evantually get something like this. It will make tagging so much quicker and less painless.

http://picasa.google.c​om …n/answer.py?ans​wer=156272

I don't have LR. I love the last Picasa, though. I just switched to it as my main photo organizing / workflow base tool. The face recognizing in Picasa does work fairly well - about 50-70% accuracy which is much better than it sounds, pretty amazing actually. Then there's a newly added (for me at least) tagging feature (i.e. categorizing). Then the ability to open RAW files for a quick edit / export, very decent built-in viewer and screensaver, fairly comprehensive global edits, uploads, geotagging, you name it. Since I don't do hundreds of photos a week, for me it's a great organizing and basic editing tool. I used XNView before that was very good too, but the latest changes in Picasa are hard to beat, especially given that it is still a pretty fast application even on my older computer (2.4 MHz Pentium IV and 1 GB of RAM, ancient video card). Plus, it has a whole team of developers and a huge company behind it. Still has a few shortcomings but even in it's current state, it beats pretty much any other free and many paid solutions.

No one (other than those who cannot say) really knows if LR will have it eventually or not.

There's alot of debate about tools like this in the LR forums. While there are alot of people who would like to see things like face recognition, import of videos and geotagging - there seems to be a very VOCAL group in opposition to them. They feel like those are "consumer oriented features" and fear it will detract from the "professional feel" or that they would be added at the expense of image quality improvements.

I think those arguments are alot of FUD, personally. (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt - using these to sway peoples opinions based on unknown, unfounded sentiments.) And I hope to see these things (and more) added to LR3. We're on to the third release, and its time some of these tools got fleshed out... argument/excuse that its still a new product is losing its merit, IMO.

Latest LR3 beta shows that Video support has been added (even against the vocal arguments of some.) Elements has face recognition, so we know Adobe has the technology... but whether (or when) these tools will be added to LR is anyone's guess. Seems to me that Adobe sometimes surprises us by adding some of these things, but on the other hand surprises us by leaving out what appear to be straightforward and blatantly obvious features or usability enhancements.

They cater to different markets, really. Picasa is turning to be a very good piece of software for consumers. From my MIL who can barely find the shutter button on her P&S (yet she is fairly proficient in sharing photos using Picasa) to some serious amateurs (I am not just counting myself, either). LR is much more targeted to people who have to do some serious processing on hundreds of photos. Picasa is not perfect - I don't like the way it handles resizing, or export ro web, or the folder view interface, - but it's getting very, very good.