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/complementing 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.