Getting Picasa to Re-Scan Faces in Photos

Picasa is the innovative photo organization software now backed by Google which scans your hard drive for photos and automatically detect faces in the photos. When you start identifying the faces, it will start trying suggesting matches. It had moments of complete geek heaven. But it’s not quite perfect yet. Especially when you have an “Unnamed Faces” folder full of what should be obvious matches.

Sometimes it misses a face, especially if that face is at an angle. Other times it seems like the program just needs to re-scan all of those “Unnamed” faces to update with all of the matching you’ve done. After scouring the web for solutions, most people seem resigned to the fact that this feature doesn’t exist. And while they are partially right, there is a way to have the app match more faces.

Go into Tools>Options and select the “Name Tags” tab. The suggestion threshold defaults to 85%, which apparently is pretty strict. Try lowering it in 5% increments and many more matches will start appearing for you. I ended up taking mine down to 70%. The time I spent weeding out false matches was far less than if I had to go through the 1000 unnamed faces in the original scan.