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Finding Photo Programs That Recognize Faces
Q. Do any of the alternatives to Picasa have the facial-recognition feature for identifying people in photos?
A. While Picasa will keep on working as a desktop application, even though Google has stopped further development on it, you have options if you want to move on. You can find software that primarily recognizes and sorts pictures by who is in them, as well as programs that include face recognition and tagging among their features.
Google’s own free Google Photos software, which works in a web browser as well as through Android and iOS apps, has a “Group similar faces” option in its settings that tries to sort pictures automatically by matching up the faces in them. The company has posted software tools to help Picasa desktop users upload their images to Google Photos and make the move to the newer program.
If you prefer to move on from Google’s picture products altogether, ad-supported programs like FotoBounce (which has a desktop version for Windows and OS X) offer face tagging. The Photos app in Windows 10 can group related pictures together and apps like Microsoft’s AutoTag ‘n Search My Photos may help if you also use Facebook, but the Windows Photo Gallery program for older versions of Microsoft’s operating system has basic face-recognition built in. For Mac users, Apple’s own Photos for OS X has a Faces feature that scans the photos in your picture collection, lets you assign names to the people it recognizes and then bundles the images by the person’s name.
Other free photo utilities abound, but if you want to move to a paid program, you can get a whole toolbox of features and tutorials.
Adobe Photoshop Elements ($100 for Windows or Mac) has long been Adobe’s desktop image software for home users and it includes face-recognition. The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC program for photo processing and editing — which works on Windows, Mac, Android and iOS — can also sort photos by faces and has an online video showing how it works; Lightroom CC is available by subscription for $10 a month and is bundled with Adobe Photoshop CC as part of the company’s Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan.
Personal Tech invites questions about computer-based technology to techtip@nytimes.com. This column will answer questions of general interest, but letters cannot be answered individually.
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