Google Silently Rolls Out Picasa 3.0 and New Features of Picasa Web Album

While everybody is recovering from the massive assault of its Chrome browser, Google silently launched Picasa 3.0, a new interface of its two-year old Picasa Web Album, or to put it simply, Google’s answer to Flickr.Picasa 3.0  is bring along some innovative technologies and new features to its latest iteration. Most noteable of these features is of course the “name tags” feature. What so innovative about this feature is that it uses a face recognition technology to identify and group similar faces in your Picasa Web Albums together. It scans through all the photos that you have uploaded in Picasa and then gives you the option to tag these photos with their “names”. Best part is, once you’ve tagged your photos based on the respective names of the faces in those photos, you can start doing some nice things – create slideshows for instance.In addition to the name tagging feature, Picasa Web Albums is also sporting a fresh, clean look aside from a new “Explore” which lets user browse through public content photos uploaded in Picasa. This is somewhat similar to Flickr’s “Everyone’s Uploads” photo streams.As for Picasa’s new features, the free photo management software for the desktop also has a beta version 3.0. This new version now has a “sync to web” button that allows you to sync specified albums from the PC to the web.Name tagging photos in Picasa is a pretty tedious task, especially if you have uploaded tons of photos already. But once you’ve tagged all your photos, the process becomes easier though. And yes, the face recognition stuff is cool.