Google officially announced that it plans to add facial recognition technology to its online photo management tool, Picasa. The new tool will encourage users to identify the people who appear in the uploaded photos. Afterwards, the application will begin suggesting tags for photos, based on facial similarities.

"Once you've started naming people, we'll start suggesting names for you based on similarity," said Mike Horowitz, Google's Picasa product manager. "The process of naming people is really addictive and tremendously fun."

The face recognition feature was released on September 2. Besides tagging, changes to the photo-sharing site are joined by a new beta version of the accompanying Picasa 3.0 photo-editing software.

Google is not the first company to add face recognition to online photo albums. Riya, when it first launched, made face recognition its central feature, but Riya's implementation, while interesting, made too many mistakes in the face recognition to be successful. If Google can make the face recognition work, it will have at least one great feature that will set it apart from its competition such as Flickr.

In 2006 Google bought Neven Vision, a company that specialized in matching facial detail with images already found in a centralized database. This is the exact principle of Picasa.

“Our face-recognition technology automatically groups pictures containing similar faces so users can quickly label a number of pictures at once. Our software determines which faces are roughly similar by looking at a few basic measurements, like the relative distance between a person’s eyes and nose, and nose and ears,” Horowitz explained.