One year ago, Google made photo and geo-tagging features available for its Picasa Web Albums service. I’m not really sure whether this made quite an impact to the online photo sharing scenes since it is not really a ground-breaking feature that time, and even up to now. This didn’t stop Google though from putting the same features to the desktop counterpart of Picasa Web Album and so Google announced Picasa 3.5 which is available now for free download.Available for both Windows and OS X users, Picasa 3.5’s photo tagging feature called Name Tags is similar to the face recognition/naming technology used by iPhoto 09. But Picasa 3.5 is a bit faster as it scans all your photos and tries to recognize their faces in those photos and categorizes this as “Unnamed People”, even before you start identifying the faces by their names.
Picasa 3.5 is also faster than Picasa Web Albums for the obvious reason that it resides and runs from your hard drive. And of course the photos you uploaded are bigger and easier to browse.
Aside from this photo tagging or Name Tag feature, Picasa 3.5 also now has a built-in Google Maps that you can use to geo-tag your photos.
Biggest feature of Picasa 3.5? – it now lets you import your photos directly to Picasa Web Albums as well as import photos directly from video camera.
