This is a Thank You for Gene and his presentation at the CIG (Computer Interest Group) meeting a few weeks ago on Picasa, the digital photo software that's free from Google. After the meeting, I started using Picasa' s face recognition for, at first, just a few of my digital photos - and then began working with more and more photos. It's so cool! I also investigated the Picasa Web Album, where you can place your photos on the web. I discovered there are 3 options - a public gallery, an "unlisted" gallery, and a Google-account-required-with-sign-in gallery. I ended up using the "unlisted" option because it didn't require anyone to create a Google account (which is very helpful for some of the relatives who can do email but hesitant with much else). This "unlisted" option also kept the photos from going public. I used the Web Album to put photos on the web and then put captions with each photo, as I had some specific photos I needed feedback from a cousin. So I put my questions - "Who's that in the back row 2nd from the left?" - in the captions. This worked GREAT! My cousin got so interested that she got 2 of her daughters involved so I "invited" them to be able to view the "unlisted" gallery I'd placed on the web as a Picasa Web Album. My cousin and I did talk on the phone but this was also wonderful because we could look at the same photo and I could update the caption online while we were talking. There are other software packages that offer some of the same features but Picasa has been easy to setup up and has really helped me identify people - and places ("Think that's the house on Oak Street?") - WITH my cousins. And there's another set of cousins I plan to do the same setup - create another Picasa Web Album and invite them to view that album online. So, Gene, without that presentation, I'd still be rumbling along, trying to identify these people. No need to make a trip to Phoenix to talk with my cousin about the photos. With Picasa's face recognition, I feel I'm leaving behind documentation about these photos. I'm really glad you brought the CIG up-to-date on Picasa! We might need another one when there are more features available. Hope this will also spur some MCGS people to come to future CIG meetings - they can be most helpful. Thanks, Gene. Jo Ann A couple tips/ideas: 1. I decided to setup two names for each married woman in the Picasa People "album" - one with her maiden name and one for her married name. This allows me to keep her younger photos separate from her married photos. I'm interested in seeing how a person changes over time. This could be done for the gentlemen as well, especially if there are a lot of photos in a specific time frame, such as Baseball Jim or Skiing Steve. 2. I had a problem uploading the photos from my Picasa non-web album to the Web Album - I had to re-do the face recognition once photos were online. This seems to be a known but inconsistent problem with Picasa's Web Album.

What a nice report from Jo Ann!  Picasa is great.  I've used Shutterfly and MyFamily.com to do the same thing JoAnn is doing with her cousins, but one does need to sign up for those sites...so your point about the option that doesn't require one to sign up is well taken! BTW -- do you know that you can put all sorts of information in an image file on your Windows computer?  You right click on the image in your directory, then click on properties, and then click on "details" on newer versions of Windows, or "summary" on older versions; then you will see all that you can add -- tags, information about the photo contents and about it's creation and ownership.  In the old days I used file names to ID the subjects within, but the file names could easily get too long; by using the feature I described above, I'm able to put in all the information I need and still keep file names short, which is very important to keeping the computer functioning properly (file names should not exceed 32 spaces at most).   I much prefer to use the simple Windows system to using an indexing software program that can catalog all my images, but made by a company that will probably go out of business, leaving me with a catalog system that can't be updated.. Have fun. Kathy Devlin

Jo Ann: Thank you for the positive comments. I'm glad you found the presentation of value and that you started using Picasa. The face recognition software is pretty amazing. The more you use it, the better it gets in recognizing faces. I've found that as I "tag" pictures of people when they were in they were children, in their teens and 20s the software gets even better. I like your idea of getting others from your family involved. Outstanding! Between all my cousins I'll bet I can get almost all of my pictures identified. A couple of tips to add to yours. 1. Once you've uploaded an album to Picasa Web Album, you can use the geo-tagging feature. Try this and see what you think. This is another fascinating feature and has great potential. 2. You can create "tags" for more than just a person's name. you can then apply a single or multiple tag to a picture. For example, "Aunt Thelma's House on Oak Street" or "Cape Cod". This has all kinds of use when you're searching for all those pictures you have that were taken in Cape Cod or Aunt Thelma's House or the 2009 Pennington Family Reunion. You can see the possibilities. Regarding the problem uploading the photos from your Picasa non-web album to the Web Album, try having Picasa find all the pictures on your computer first. Or, just have it add the folder/s that you want to work on to its folders. Then make sure you have the facial recognition feature turned "on". Then go do something else while Picasa goes through all your pictures. It should find many other people for you to "tag" and others that it thinks belong to a person and will ask you to confirm it's suggestion. Also, make sure you have the "sync" feature turned on for each of the albums you want to sync between your local computer folder/s and your Picasa albums. As you discover more tips or tricks and that something didn't work the way I described, post it to the list and maybe others will join in. How about posting your message to the MCGS blog at http://maringensoc.blogspot.com? I'll send you an invitation to be a contributor to the blog. If anybody else wants to be a contributor, let me know. The more we get, the better. Anybody can read the blog and it's posts and anybody can comment on any of the posts. Enjoy! Gene Pennington MCGS Webmaster, CIG & TMG User Group http://www.maringensoc.org MCGS Blog: http://maringensoc.blogspot.com/