Anything better than Picasa3 (last version released) for face recognition?
I've been using the last released version of Picasa3 (windows) to do facial recognition for all my own and family photos over the years. It's working great, also it has the feature to write the face tags in the XMP standard (which I leverage and rewrite to…
I've been using the last released version of Picasa3 (windows) to do facial recognition for all my own and family photos over the years. It's working great, also it has the feature to write the face tags in the XMP standard (which I leverage and rewrite to the JPG files) in the header of the file without additional files beside the JPG file itself. What is better today, and by what margin? I've done some quick research on this and seems there exist some options that are "marginally" better, more than a decade later (or more), this is where we are? Or are there just no FREE options for something "a lot" better. Like Digikam, tried it and didn't find it's better on face recognition. Other options like immich and photoprism aren't really practical, I just need the SW to do face recognition and write the the file, I don't need it to present it library style. Picasa is free, and seems to work quite well. We're in 2026 and I thought we'd be way way ahead of what Picasa can do, but I don't see that we are - of course, I can be very wrong here, open to options that are proven to do MUCH better that Picasa, not just a bit better. Thanks in advance!
Collected discussion
The models got way better - the packaging died with Picasa. All the good recognition moved to servers and phones, nobody writes XMP into files anymore. Closest thing to what you want is Tonfotos - basically a Picasa successor, writes to file metadata, no server. Immich honestly has the best recognition of anything free today, but it keeps faces in its own DB, not in the JPGs - which I'm guessing kills it for you.
I'd rather not, would like this feature baked in. But thanks for the idea!
Thanks, never heard of this, will check it out once i get a chance! Cheers
I will give it another go once I have a chance! Thanks for the feedback!
If you are comfortable with command line (or letting AI do the coding and use command line for you) I was able to run a batch script after Immich does the recognition to query the DB and write tags to the files. When I did it a while back I didn't know about XMP standard but I assume Claude/Codex could figure it out.
In my experience Digikam, at least the latest releases, is much better than Picasa when it comes to face detection and face recognition. I had already tagged most of my library in Picasa, and digikam found lots of new faces in the oicture sets that I had already tagged with Picasa. Specially if the person is not looking directly at the camera, is slightly blurry, etc.
I could have written this post myself including the Digikam review. Tonfotos sounds interesting, though it is $59 for a single user license (and $159 for a 5 user family license). There is a free version, but I'm not sure what the restrictions are yet.