Google release Picasa 3.0 last week. It is a great improvement over the previous version - which was already great for non-professionals. The 3.0 has some great features like great collage making (the previous one sucked) and in general great user interface.

But the best feature yet is the face recognition and name tagging from the same. Unfortunately, this is available only for the Web albums and not on the desktop software. Not terribly sure why. The face recognition, while not perfect, is very good. Try it out to see how cool it is.

And everything is free!!!

Now the bad piece of news is there is no Mac version for Picasa 3.0. Which is a bummer for Mac fans like me. Still, you can upload iPhoto pictures into Picasaweb. While it allows automatic Picasaweb tag creation from the iPhoto keywords, it does not allow vice versa. So, you cannot get the recognition done on the web and pull it back into iPhoto library. And there is no plugin for iPhoto to do face recognition worth talking about.