Today Google released Picasa 3.5, an updated version of its free photo editing software. The most notable addition in this release is an enhanced version of Picasa's people-tagging feature, previously only available in Picasa Web Albums. With Picasa you can edit and organize your images, and sync and share them with Picasa Web Albums, Google's online photo-sharing site. Other improvements include Google Maps integration for faster and easier geotagging, a smarter keyword-tagging interface, and more importing options.
You can then go through and add name tags one at a time or in bulk. When you first launch Picasa 3.5, it scans all of the images on your computer and groups similar faces. If you already use name tags in your Picasa Web Albums, you can log into your Google account and download that information to the Picasa application (Tools-> Download Name Tags from Picasa Web Albums). Logging in also means you can use your Google contacts list when tagging people. Geotagging is much easier in 3.5. In the Places panel, a Google map displays the locations of your geotagged photos. Picasa will automatically create an album for each person you tag.
To add location information to a photos, you can search directly in the panel and add a pin, or drag and drop an image or images onto the map from your library. It's now possible to upload images directly to Picasa Web Albums from your camera, iPhone, or memory card. Picasa's import features have also been greatly improved. Before importing you can choose which images to include or exclude. This update is for both Mac and PCs, and is the first Mac version of Picasa to drop the beta label.
For example, you could opt to upload all of the images to your hard drive, but only starred images to the Web.