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Roughly a year after rolling out facial recognition on its Picasa Web Albums site, Google on Tuesday is introducing an updated version of its Picasa software (for Windows | Mac) that can recognize faces in photos stored on users’ computers.

Just as it does on the Web, Picasa scans your photos for faces, then groups together photos of specific people. It’s then your job to tell it who they are as well as confirm its guesses. If someone you’re tagging is in your Google address book, you can also look them up very quickly with auto-complete. Otherwise, Google gives you the option to add them as someone new; this information then gets synced back up your Google address book.

Picasa's software can now scan for faces, and offer up recommendations of people it thinks are your contacts.

(Credit: CNET)

The system worked very well for me, but it was slow going. I had to leave the program running overnight for it to finish processing my 3,700 or so photos for faces. It also had my processor humming, since it was doing all the work on my machine instead of Google’s giant server farm.

That’s not to say Google hasn’t included a few things to help speed up the process. For one, if you’ve got photos that are both hosted online and on your hard drive–and that have already been scanned for faces, the Picasa software can grab that information and add it to your local library. This saves it from having to scan the same photos twice.

And for photos it thinks contain people you’ve verified as contacts, it gives you quick “yes” and “no” buttons that can add or reject name tags. Oftentimes, clicking “yes” adds a few more suggestions for photos of that person that the program feels is safe enough to recommend. There’s also a way to group accept or group decline its suggestions, which saves time you would have otherwise spent clicking the buttons one at a time.

Users can now geotag their photos right in the Picasa, just like they can in Picasa Web Albums.

(Credit: CNET)

As with Picasa Web Albums, your reward for trudging through your photos to add tags is better organization, which for a massive library of old, archived shots can be hugely helpful. And unlike Picasa’s albums feature, name tags let you quickly sort all of your photos by who’s in them–not when they were taken or how you’ve personally organized them. It also continues to do this with any photos you add to your library in the future.

Along with facial recognition, the new version of the software integrates Google Maps–a much-wanted feature among geotagging fans. Just as you’re able to do in Picasa Web Albums, you can search for a location in Google Maps, then amend that geographic data to your photo. You can also view groups of photos by place by clicking on little red map markers that show where individual photos have been placed. Unlike the facial recognition feature though, this is still largely a manual process of doing a search for each location then adding it to a photo, or group of photos, at once. That is, unless you have a camera with GPS (which most people don’t).

One big thing Google is bringing to the table with this release over something like Apple’s iPhoto (at least for Mac users) is the capability to tag items that are spread out across your entire computer, as well as external drives. In that regard, it does a much better job than iPhoto when it comes to automatically importing and organizing photos–all without disturbing where they’re stored. Considering it now does much of what iPhoto is able to do with faces, with the added bonus of grabbing that contact information from your Google address book, it makes for a very seamless experience.

The new version of the software should appear as an update for users of Picasa v3.1 the next time they start the program. It can also be forced to update by clicking the “check for updates online” option in the help menu.

Previously: Revamped Google Picasa site identifies photo faces

Originally posted at Web Crawler

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Picasa 3.5 brings facial recognition to the desktop

In my book, animated GIFs are one step above glitter graphics in terms of junk trends of the Internet, but I’m a big fan of any tool that makes creating them easy and fun. Gifsoup is no exception–you just point it towards any YouTube video and it turns it into an animated GIF.

To do this, it first downloads the clip to its servers, and then gives you simple controls to choose when you want it to begin and end. When you’ve picked out that perfect 10-second (or less) section of the video, you just hit a single button to finish the job. The GIFs are then hosted, and ready to be embedded elsewhere; you’re also able to save it to your hard drive in one of three sizes. Either way, it retains a small Gifsoup watermark that sits in the bottom right-hand corner of the image.

Below are two I made in less than a minute using Gifsoup’s tools.

See also: Gickr does software-free animated GIF creation (which uses multiple image files instead of video)

Originally posted at Web Crawler

See the original post here:
Gifsoup turns YouTube vids into animated GIFs

In preparation for the third season of its hit series Mad Men, cable network AMC has put out a new marketing tool called “Mad Men Yourself.” It lets fans of the show create themselves (or their friends) as early-1960s cartoon charactures using a variety of costumes, props, and body parts that are loosely tied to the world within the show.

Set to rhythmic lounge lizard music, you can assemble your virtual self piece by piece. When done you can then download and export your creation in sizes ready for Twitter, Facebook, and as desktop wallpapers.

It’s not nearly as fun as the one Fox did for the Simpson’s Movie back in mid-2007 (nor is there a 7-11 tie-in), but there are a wealth of options to make yourself look as similar, or “out there” as you wish.

The closest I could get was looking like Kevin Spacey with a mean five o’clock shadow. See if you can do better.

Put your virtual 1960s self together in style. Or just ditch the suit and grab a donut and an eye patch.

(Credit: CNET)

Originally posted at Web Crawler

Read more from the original source:
AMC lets you ‘Mad Men Yourself’

Google has a long history of tracking user activity, and the introduction of its Chrome operating system later this year is sure to follow suit. While we know that it’s being built off of Linux, one big thing we don’t know is how its terms of service will differ from those found in other Google products, and what kinds of user data it will be collecting. Based on the company’s track record of watching and monetizing user data, it could be anything from which applications you’re using, to all the information that’s coming in and out of your computer.

To provide a better picture on what to expect, let’s take a look at some of the ways Google is currently monitoring user activity in a handful of its products and how that may trickle down into the OS:

Google personalized Web search–Google’s bread and butter business is its search engine, and its personalized search is a way to put a face on the data. When you’re signed in with your Google account you can opt in to having your Web history tracked; Google archives all of the sites you’ve clicked on from search results, as well as what time of day you clicked on them.

For those who are not signed in, the company uses identifiers like cookies and IP addresses. But when you’re signed in it can actually aggregate that data no matter what computer you’re on. With a system-level log-in, it could theoretically do this no matter what browser you’re using, giving Google a far richer set of data.

Chrome browser–When Chrome was first released, Google got in some hot water over its terms of service, which stated that Google had the rights to license any content that went through the browser. It quickly backtracked on the claim, citing that the terms heavily borrowed from other Google products and that it didn’t make sense for Chrome. This would have given Google licensing control over things like user photos, videos, and words.

The one area where Google’s Chrome can still access some of that information is with its reports system. This is an opt-in program for users to provide Google with crash reports and detailed information about what features they’re using. Google has said this does not include any information from form fields, or from users’ Google accounts. However, it does track what sites and search terms you’ve entered into the address bar.

Gmail–Google’s Web mail service was one of the first Web mail services to provide contextual advertising, meaning it actually goes through your e-mail messages to give you advertisements that match up with a conversation you’re having. Did you mention skiing in that last e-mail? Don’t be surprised if you start seeing ads for local lift tickets or a new pair of ski boots.

Gmail also tracks what features users are using, including which settings are turned on and off, the themes they’ve chosen, and which ads they’re clicking on. On the flip side, it does not share personal information with third parties; the only thing it gives to advertisers are the metrics on how many times their ads have been clicked.

Google Desktop–Google Desktop is sure to be a part of the Chrome OS. This software indexes all the content on your computer and makes it able to be searched and sorted, sometimes including Web search results from Google. It also indexes Web history, chats, e-mails, and information about your computer like what operating system you’re using and the hardware configuration.

As far as usage goes, it can track which sites you’re visiting in order to serve up personalized news. The software also has an opt-in “improvement” service that tracks crash reports, how many searches users are doing, and how long the software takes to pull them up.

Considering Google desktop is currently add-on software for Windows, Mac, and Linux (the latter of which the Chrome OS is being built off of), it will likely be more deeply integrated, and possibly something you cannot disable.

Google Checkout–Checkout is Google’s online payment service. It lets customers pay for items using credit cards or bank accounts that are tied to their Google credentials. As far as collecting information goes, Google holds all of a customer’s financial information on its servers including name, address, and account numbers. It also tracks how quickly they type in that information when making purchases, which account they used to pay for the good, and what that good was, giving the company a broad overview of a particular customer’s purchasing habits.

For years Google has struggled to gain marketshare on incumbent PayPal, which has offered a similar Web payment system since the late 1990s. One area where PayPal has not ventured though is to the desktop. Google could easily ingrain Checkout into the OS, allowing users to make payments inside Chrome OS software, or to purchase applications in a similar fashion to how Apple has done it on the iPhone with its own app store.

Google Maps/Location–Google Maps and its related location-based services are one of the highest areas of interest for privacy advocates. Google Maps’ Street View service provides 3D, street-level imagery of streets around the world, which is taken by camera-equipped vans that take photos of people and buildings. When Google rolled out its Street View service, faces were not blurred, however Google caved to privacy advocates and began doing so in early 2008.

The service can also locate where users are by obtaining information about what Wi-Fi routers or cell towers they’re using to connect to the Web. This may be a standard part of the Chrome OS SDK, allowing applications that run on it to determine a user’s location for various geographically-specific features. Many mobile applications are already doing this, including Evernote, which tags where each user note was created.

What to expect

Layers of data sharing. It’s safe to assume that there will be many built-in ways to “share” some or all of your personal information with Google. Where the company’s approach may differ from its other Web products is that it can get a far broader sense of what you’re doing off its own properties, and even when offline.

Google typically has an all-or-nothing approach when it comes to what types of personal data it can harvest. When it comes to operating systems, however, a lot more of that information is localized. Google may offer a way to select certain parts of your application library, or hard disk that cannot be indexed or tracked in a similar fashion to what it does with its desktop search program.

Lots of toggles. To manage all these security and privacy options in one place it’s likely there will be an extensive settings panel that lets users track what they are and are not sharing. Google may go so far as to make this more transparent with some sort of task bar that lets you change it on the fly, just like it’s done with its privacy mode in the Chrome browser. Just imagine being able to open and use certain applications without the OS keeping track of you ever using them, the same way it treats visiting certain sites.

A deep usage tracking and reporting system. One of the most exciting (or potentially creepy) parts of this will be Google’s approach to tracking how users are interacting with its OS. The company spends a considerable amount of time and resources on tracking user experience on its sites both with extended betas, and internal research studies. Having that same kind of tracking system baked into the OS can give Google a very simple way to see what’s working and what’s not.

As such, Google is likely to take a more extensive approach than Microsoft, which has a more limited system for tracking user activity on Windows. Users can opt in to a “customer experience improvement program” for Office, while Windows users have the option of sending information to Microsoft when applications or the entire operating system crashes. Google could go as far as keeping track of how long you keep your machine running at a time, or what times of day you use certain applications in order to create battery-saving hardware profiles.

More details about the Chrome OS, including privacy and licensing information are likely to be unveiled later this year when Google makes the code available as open source.

See more here:
What will Google’s Chrome OS watch you do?

Besides blazing fast JavaScript benchmarks, privacy mode is the big new feature in modern browsers. The latest version of Firefox includes many privacy enhancements that can keep others from seeing what you’ve been up to while online. But what if a friend, family member, or boss wants to borrow and/or look at something on your computer? How do you play it cool and hide tabs you don’t want them to see?

Developer Diego Ruiz has come up with a solution called HideTab that does just that. You can very quickly hide one or all open tabs with a keyboard shortcut or right-click contextual menu. This means the tabs can’t be seen both along the top of your browser, and in the list of open sites. Instead, you can only see what you’ve hidden in a small, and subtle pop-up menu that sits in the bottom-right-hand corner of your browser. There’s also a keyboard shortcut that restores all of the tabs you’ve hidden.

HideTab lets you hide certain tabs one at a time, or all at once in case someone comes by when you're looking at something you don't want them to see.

(Credit: CNET)

One thing to keep in mind is that hidden tabs still continue to run in the background, which means if you’re watching a video or listening to music it’s going to keep playing. Hopefully a future version will provide the option to mute the audio from any tabs that are hidden.

Beyond privacy, this add-on can be a useful tool for leaning down the number of tabs you want to see. I regularly do tasks in my browser that involve hopping around to a few specific tabs, and sometimes it’s nice to hone down to just those few without transferring them to a new window or doing a lot of reorganizing.

HideTab is an experimental extension, which means there may be a few bugs that have not been worked out prior to its review by the Mozilla community.

Related: How to hide your tracks at work

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HideTab lets you cloak embarrassing tabs quickly