Impressed by Picasa 3.5 Faces Feature, Better Than iPhoto 09, Recognized Child Face Across Time

Wow! I'm really impressed by Google's Picasa 3.5 release.

Google Picasa

So far, its "Faces" (face recognition) feature is working much better than iPhoto 09's face recognition feature (which is pretty good itself). The thing that has impressed me most so far is that Picasa Faces seems to recognize my daughter's face much more accurately across time (aging from infant to teen) that iPhoto. iPhone provided recognition in a very narrow age range during growth (a year or two). Picasa 3.5's faces seems to be able to generalize much more broadly across time as her face changed during childhood.

This has let to a few more false positives than iPhoto. However, it has not been a tremendous number in my testing so far. Running it on my full photographic collection of nearly 15 years of digital photos as I write this. Will see if its hit rate remains high as the process continues.