Tagging photos with Google Plus and Picasa

I have scanned about 15 years from the FASS photo archives and uploaded them to Picasa and Google Plus. Due to G+'s requirement for a real person, Andrew Forber has allowed his G+ account to be the host for the photos.

I scanned the photos on my document scanner. The upside is that it's fast and I was able to stick large stacks in for scanning. The downside is that dust and stuck pixels have made lines on some of the photos.

G+ offers some advantages over Facebook -- a nice UI, with larger photos, a nice slideshow and the detection of most faces in the photos for easy tagging. It still has some flaws.

Using a Google Plus account

You can create a http://plus.google.com for yourself (or turn your existing Google account into a G+ account.) Then add "Andrew Forber" to your circles -- the one that says it is hosting FASS photos, and which has a FASS group photo with Andrew and myself as the photo icon.

When you create your account, you may elect to turn on "Find my face in photos" on the G+ Settings page -- it's a checkbox near the bottom and is described in more detail here.

Then go to Andrew's Photo Albums. Unfortunately they are sorted by order of upload. Some years have multiple albums due to different batches. Click on a year and then click on a photo to get the large view. You may want to make your window full screen.

Move your mouse over the faces. If this album has been face detected, you will see circles on many of the faces. Click on them, and enter their name. You do not need to enter and E-mail so just hit enter twice. Note that you can't tag the faces until you are circled back by the Andrew account, which usually will happen when I am next online.

You will see, in the right hand column, the names of people already tagged. Names you add will show up there. The link "Add a new tag" lets you put a tag on a face that the face detector didn't find -- it misses some of them.

You can also comment on photos. Just for fun, or to point out problems like duplicates, or wrong years etc. If you see duplicates, check to see if one scan is better than the others and mark the lesser ones as duplicates. Some of the dups will have more dust or lines.

Direct Access

If you want to do a lot of work on the photos, including deleting dups, rotating shots or extensive tagging, you can do more if you log into the Picasa account that hosts this. You can do even more (particularly tagging) if you download Picasa 3.9 for your computer and tag in that, and then re-sync with the web album. Contact me if you are willing to do that. With direct access you can bulk tag, though only people who have G+ accounts

Browse the Albums in Picasa Web

If you don't want a Google Plus account, or prefer the Picasa interface, you can also look at these albums on the Picasa Web site. (If it redirects you to G+ there will be a yellow box at the top to get you back.)

On this site you can do a few more things, like tune thumbnail size, do slide shows, and browse lists of people tagged in the albums. You can also download albums to your own Picasa, and see the album descriptions that for some reason G+ does not show.

Why not a Google Plus "Page" -- which is the method for an organization to have a page on G+? That's still in beta, and the photo albums for pages are lower functionality, and don't have tagging of faces.

Do you have photos to upload?

You can upload photos to this collection. Send an E-mail with the photo attached, and possibly a caption in the subject line (include year) to 103202787649310540802.password@picasaweb.com where you replace "password" with "fassshow"