Face recognition

I use Picasa to manage my far-too-many pictures.  I find it very useful and always install the newest version when it's available.  Recently an upgrade came along which includes face recognition.  It picks out the faces in your photos and offers you the chance of naming them and will even offer some suggestions - not many, it must be said.  Apart from a few special family occasions, I rarely take photos of people but Picasa found thousands of faces.

Some were family and friends of course, others weren't the main object of the photo but unsurprising nevertheless, while many were a little unexpected.

I wasn't particularly surprised to find statues, even where they weren't the focus of my attention.

A statue on a bridge in Rome

But when all you are doing is looking at doorways, sometimes there was more there than I realised.

One of the doorways into the cathedral in Bourges, central France

I've been forgetting to look at the details.

The carvings in the entrances of Bourges Cathedral are worthy of attention in their own right but I hadn't really noticed until Picasa asked me to name the faces it found.

And again, somewhere like Versailles, you can be so absorbed in ornate style of the larger picture....

A corner inside the Palace of Versailles

....that you miss the smaller story being played out on the ceiling.

I have dozens of other examples I could show you, but it isn't always a total success.  You could never anticipate that Picasa would ignore all the available faces at the boulangerie.

A small town in France

.... in favour of this.

As you can tell, I have wasted spent many happy hours with Picasa, but in all honesty I can't see the point of face recognition in tagging photos.  I know who the people are in my pictures.  I don't need to label them.  If I don't know them, I can't label them, nor do I need to.  The great benefit for me is that it's shown me I need to look for the detail as well as the bigger picture.  I seem to suffer from the opposite of not seeing the wood for the trees.