'Say Cheese!' Google Updates Picasa And Web Albums To Version 3.0

It's the morning after, and I am over Chrome. For now. Google did make some other announcements yesterday. One of them included a big one about the hugely updated picture-sharing service, Picasa. New features include facial recognition capabilities.There are two pieces to this picture. The revised desktop software, Picasa 3.0, and the online photo-sharing service, Picasa Web Albums. Google has updated both.

Google is calling Picasa 3.0 (beta) the next-generation of photo-editing software. Picasa 3.0 is the desktop software part of the puzzle (available for Windows only) that helps you organize, print, and edit your photos. Picasa 3.0 gives users a retouching tool to wipe out scratches and blemishes; a slide show movie maker that uploads to YouTube with a click; automatic red-eye removal; smart auto-cropping that guides you on how to zoom in on your subject; and drag-and-drop capabilities for creating and manipulating photos slide shows. The desktop software, naturally, integrates with Google's online software.

Along with making it easier to manipulate and edit photos, Google is hoping to speed up the often laborious task of tagging photos. According to Google, "Instead of requiring you to painstakingly label your photos one-by-one, the 'name tags' feature in Picasa Web Albums uses advanced clustering technology to quickly group together pictures of the same person." This means you can assemble the dozen or so shots you took of your kids doing cute stuff over the Labor Day holiday weekend and automatically assign name tags to them all at once.

Google says this tagging software can also be used to sort through photos and create custom slide shows of specific people or groups of people, which you can then share with those people.

The new software is also offering a one-click feature called Web sync, which "uploads an album and keeps it updated on the Web when you make changes on your PC."

The updates to both the desktop software and online software make for a powerful combination.