Google can sort digital photos on face value

— -- If the human brain sees a million images per day and can instantly identify them, why couldn't software do that, too? Making such a thing a reality has been the longtime goal of German-born physicist Hartmut Neven, whose facial-recognition software firm was purchased by Google in 2006, with the stated goal of bringing his vision to digital photography.

Instead of sifting through thousands of computer file names and badly named photo folders, what if we could organize our pictures by faces instead, gathering all of our pictures of Mom, Dad and the rest of the brood together?

Neven joined forces with Google's Picasa photo editing and management software team, spending two years developing a tool that could bring photo facial recognition to the masses.

Now the software is here, and Google is winning raves for its accuracy. It's not perfect, as Google engineers point out, but it's still a major step forward.

"I find it interesting to understand how the human mind works," says Neven, who now works at Google as a lead technical manager. "How it is so adept and capable at learning. And the best way to teach the theory on brain functions is to write a program that's quite similar."

Google's face-recognition system ties into Picasa Web Albums, Google's online photo-sharing service. It's one of the search giant's smaller offerings. Web Albums had just a 3.4% share of the online photo market in August, according to researcher Hitwise, ranking No. 5. Market leader Photobucket had a 34.7% share.

Google recently upgraded its Picasa desktop photo-editing application with faster uploading tools. Face recognition, however, happens on the Web. After uploading pictures to Web Albums, you simply click the "add name tag" feature. A group of 200 shots from your family vacation, for instance, will be broken into groups based on the faces — 60 of Dad, 40 of Mom, etc.

Just match names with faces

Your job is to match the name to the face by typing in their names. The idea is that, after each face has been identified and tagged you could use the information to, say, call up a group of photos of brother and Mom together, or you with a specific group of friends, and make an instant slideshow.