Why is Google's "face recognition" feature available only in Picasa WEB and not Picasa for the PC?

Question

I friend asked me this today.

Picasa Web has a cool (and frightening :-) feature where it will recognize all the faces in your photo album.

But the PC (desktop) version doesn't have this.

Several reasons I can think of:

1. They just haven't gotten around to writing the PC version of the code.
2. They are licensing that feature and it costs a lot more (or isn't available) on the PC.
3. Takes a lot of processing power (this seems odd b/c MY PC cycles are free to Google, but they have to pay for for cycles consumed on their server.

Any other thoughts?

Answer 1

I'm certain it'll make it out in coming releases but Google is a funny company when it comes to its own competing/complimenting services. One thing is for sure, only somebody on the Picasa team could give an accurate answer.

But we could hypothesise several things...

• They don't want their code reverse-engineered.
• (As you say), they aren't licensed to redist
• It's blocked in the dev version by other new features that aren't complete yet
• They don't want to release it because they want people to use PicasaWeb as a social photo network.

I don't think processing power is an issue. If they're running it in bulk on their own servers for free, a modern desktop could probably run it without issue.

Answer 2

From my limited contact with face recognition software, it's probably the redistribution issue. When I dealt with it, face recognition was its own little world with extremely high per-CPU licensing costs and tremendous paranoia about code getting loose.

Answer 3

Actually, its in, just in limited functionality when you do a search, there's an icon to find only photos with faces. The experimental passport feature also works that way.

So the answer is:

• Not the same base (APIs) available or used and not the same language so its not directly portable.
• Not the same software and there are no stated goals to make both apps feature equivalent.
• Programmers are limited and their time is too. They make choices as to what implement now.

Answer 4

No idea if this is the case for Picasa, but there's another case where licensing could be the issue. If the server-side code is using code with a restrictive license with DRM (GPL, for example) which restricts how you can distribute modules using the code. Running that module on a web server, where the user only gets the output, is legal under such licenses. If that code was distributed, there would be many legal requirements attached which would likely be very undesirable for commercial software companies, including google. This is one very good reason to have some capabilities only accessible through web services.

Answer 5

I'm not so sure it's not a processing issue. It took Google's massive servers 30 minutes to run through all my photos. I can only imagine that same task would have taken days on my local machine.

Answer 6

This was also the case with Riya (who was arguably the first to market with reliable facial recognition for consumer photo collections).

The biggest reasons are likely:

• Processing Time (they can't control how fast your CPU is and therefore they can't control the experience). Facial recognition is very likely to be process intensive (this was Riya's stated reason for not doing it client-side)
• The recognition process requires a LARGE volume of data for processing that is only accessible on the server? (In other words, the process needs to spin through millions of faces, not just the faces that you have on your hard drive?)