Google has introduced face recognition technology into Picasa, its free online photo sharing website. With this addition, Picasa will now automatically organize pictures based on the people in them and make it easier for users to label and arrange them. The site is able to organize a large number of pictures using face recognition but Google has revealed that this works best when the person is facing the camera. Also, shadows and lighting may cause some pictures to go unrecognized by the software. Its interesting to point here that back in 2006 Google had acquired Niven Vision, a company that dealt with facial recognition software.

The Picasa web album has also received other new features including a new interface, ability to share full-resolution pictures and an application that allows users to browse through pictures shared by other users.

In addition, Google has also launched the beta version of Picasa 3.0, their free photo-editing software. The new beta version provides syncing changes made to photos on the PC (using Picasa, of course) with the Picasa album online. Also, photo correction and making movies using photos are now possible.