So Picasa 3 Beta was just released and as you know Picasa is my favorite photo editor and organizer for Windows. There are some awesome new things in this beta version but it also lacks some features. Read on to find out why its great and what it lacks.

The one new feature I was really excited for was “name tags” where you tag a face and attach a name and Picasa goes through all your photos and tags any photo that the face is in, awesome right?  Apparently this is only available in the web version which means to use this feature you have to upload all of your photos to the web site. Not cool Google. Instead Google gave us some dumbed down version of the feature that just tells you if the photo contains a face or not, which is only kind of cool.

There are numerous little interface tweaks that make Picasa a little more pleasant to work with but really aren’t worth going into. One cool change is that when open, Picasa hijacks your print screen key and automatically makes a jpeg every time the button is pressed, which is kind of useful.  Now instead of having to launch Picasa to view photos you can use the included Picasa Photo Viewer, seen right.  It’s not really all that useful considering how quickly Picasa launches.

Overall Picasa 3 is a welcome improvement to Picasa, but it should include the same face recognition software as the web album does. Either way I will continue using Picasa for all my photo viewing and editing needs.

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