Picasa Name Tag

Recently Picasa web album has added a new feature called name tag. It is similar to the name tagging function on Facebook where you can highlight people's face in the photo and name them (it doesnt has to be face actually)

To enable this new functionality, you have to go to the settings and turn the name tags function on. You can also chose to hide the name tags from public


For the first time use, Picasa will automatically scan through all the existing photos and detect all possible faces in each photo. It is not 100% accurate, but in most cases it works quite well if people are clear in the photos, and this definitely saves you a lot of time to tag people one by one.

After the initial scan completed, you can go into your album and start naming the tags!

If the face is detected successfully you will find a white square on the photo where you can type in the name of the person. If you have a gmail account, it will try to find the name you typed from your gmail contact list. You can always add new name tag by clicking the "add" button on the left hand side.

After tagging your photos, visitors to your web album will see the list of people in your album
They can click on the person's name and see all the photos tagged against this person, very handy for people who dont care about photos without them. This function works in both Gallary level and Album level.

If you are the owner of the album, you will be able to see a new "people" tab where it lists out all the name tags in your album, and some tools are provided for you to manage the tags.
One very handy tool that Picasa provides is when you click the "find more" link on the above screen, you will be able to do a mass tag!!
It will list out ALL the unnamed tags in all album (mainly from the first time auto face detection), and you can select the photos you want to tag against the selected person! Amazingly it will find all the faces that it think belongs to this name tag and list them in the front!! And its quite accurate! (I think you need to tag some photos against the name first so that it will have higher chance of matching correct person)
This saves you so much time from going through every single photo in your album but unfortunately I only found out about this after I done over 2/3 of the photos in my album...

Alright thats all for the brief intro of this new name tag feature for Picasa, I spent whole day today tagging my photos and my wrist sores... better have some rest now lol.