Having recently returned from holiday in Chicago with far too many photos, I downloaded the latest version of Google’s Picassa to try and get them organised. I’m not disappointed, particularly thanks to two great features: mapping and face recognition.

Some of the photos were taken with an iPhone so have GPS data encoded within them – Picassa automatically marks the location of all these photos on an integrated instance of Google Maps so you can see where they are taken right down to the nearest few meters! Can’t remember the restaurant where you had that great meal captured in the photo? Now you know. Definitely a good reason to make sure your next camera has integrated GPS.

Face recognition does what you’d expect, but in an easier and better way that I’d thought possible. Picassa identifies faces within photos, asks you to name a few and then makes a guess at the remainder. It takes a bit of processing time but the overall accuracy is very good indeed. It gets a bit carried away in crowd scenes – it had a particularly good time with photos from Wimbledon – but thankfully you can decline the opportunity of naming everyone. In fact, most of the wrongly assigned faces tend to be these type, which have been extracted from tiny portions of an image and are there very low resolution.

So what’s the point of it all it all? Well, basically it facilitates better search. There’s no longer the need to edit filenames or image tags to describe the people in a photo or where it was taken. The only things you’d really need to add are verbs – I don’t see Picassa being able to automatically distinguish between, for example, dancing and eating any time soon. Also, you might want to tag non-human objects like vehicles, animals or plants. There are some irritations in Picassa 3.5, but overall it’s great, and it’s free!