How To Waste Hours In 3 Easy Steps

1. Go to http://picasa.google.com/ and download Picasa 3.5 (not the 3.0 or 3.1 version.)

2. Tell Picasa to recognize people's faces in your collection of photographs.

3. When Picasa is not sure about a face, it will ask you whether a face belongs to someone. This is where you will spend hours. Very addictive.

P.S.

1. I know that iPhoto '09 already has this feature, but I switched to Picasa 3 many months ago because iPhoto '08 was gobbling up my disk space. Whenever I made a small adjustment (like straighten, lighten, etc.), iPhoto created a copy of the original. Soon, I was running out of disk to store my photographs. Picasa is more forgiving in this regard since it only stores the commands that I want to apply to the original pictures, not copies of the pictures. Also, I didn't buy iLife '09 (in which iPhoto '09 can be found) either.

2. Picasa runs on Mac and Windows. Within 2 hours of installing it on my Mac, I told my wife and she got it running on her Windows machine. Since then, both of us have been classifying unknown faces like crazy.

3. Titus had a lot of fun clicking faces to help Picasa.

My Wife Discovers Picasa

Now that I post a few online albums from Picasa, my wife is infected with the idea.

She goes all out for Titus' and Tatia's sport days!
http://picasaweb.google.com/mama.aor/20090109TitusSportDay
http://picasaweb.google.com/mama.aor/20090108TatiaSportDay

These would be precious memory one day when our teenage children scream that we don't understand them :-D  The problem with the present is that it's too ephemeral, so I guess we better enjoy all the small pleasures as they come.

Of course, I still think Aor's Tabblo.com pages looks much better but it requires considerably more work to set up.