Revamped Google Picasa site identifies photo faces
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-10026577-39.html
(CNET News, September 2, 2008)
Google has announced a new way to automatically tag photos containing human faces. This feature is called “name tag” and suggests proper tags for a picture once you tell it who is who.
Those who have used the iTunes after organizing their songs with tags may understand how tagging makes it easier to find and play songs. In spite of the convenience that tagging delivers, what makes users reluctant to put tags on their contents in various forms was the tedious nature of tagging work. In this sense, the Google’s new feature could be one of breakthroughs to turn untagged contents into tagged ones.
According to the article, once you’ve started identifying people in your pictures, you can tag about 200 persons in more than 100 pictures just in mere 15 minutes. Imagine how convenient it will be if you can retrieve a proper set of pictures from your huge picture storage by just putting in the name of the person you are looking for.
Despite some erroneous suggestions are made by this feature from time to time, I think that this attempt shows a new possibility how people can organize contents by tags more easily in the future.
Relevant lectures:
8. Classification
15. Personal Information Management
18. Metadata for Multimedia
27. Multimedia IR