Deven Kalra’s Weblog

I take a lot of picture. I have probably more than 10,000 pictures on my disk comprising almost 30 GB of storage. I have tried a number of photo organization tools and had finally settled on imatch from photools. This tool has very nice categorization features though it still requires a lot of manual work.

I had tried Picasa about two years ago and it seemed completely inadequate to me. It tried to do everything and it was hard for me make it do what I wanted. I tried Picasa 3.6 this week and I totally converted.

THe best feature that makes Picasa a winner is face recognition. It works amazingly well and it improves continuously. First it locates faces quite well. Secondly, it has a very efficient user interface that lets you tag photos with people’s names. Then, it finds matching faces with 90-95% accuracy and continously adds to the collection, seemingly improving its match algorithm. It even correctly identified pictures from people over 20 years of aging.

The naming tools are also quite efficient. For example, in the unnamed category, the tools similar faces close to each other so you can select multiple images and tag at once.

In addition, the photo processing tools it provides are quite good. It has the usual special effects tools such as contrast, sharpening, sepia etc. Another useful tools is cropping. It comes with some preset cropping ratios and even provides some cropping suggestions based on face placement.

Over all, a great improvement as compared to previous versions.