*New* Windows Live Gallery Beta

The new Windows Live Gallery now includes face tagging. When you open a photo containing faces, it will prompt you that it has detected faces by boxing up these faces, asking you to click on them to identify them. Now, that’s one really useful feature as it allows you to search for photos of a particular person, or maybe years later, when you see an old photo and cannot recognise some of the people in the photo, you can just simply mouse over their faces and their names will pop up, refreshing your memory.

The face detection algorithm is rather accurate, and has correctly identified what’s a face and what’s not. However, it does not work well with close up shots or a side view of a head. Fret not, you can just simply click on the “Add People Tag” button in the right pane to draw box a face and do your tagging, demonstrated in the screenshot below.

There’s a cheeky “That’s me” button too, which screams out to you that you should take more pictures of yourself too. However, it’s rather irritating as it requires you to click on it first before identifying yourself in the picture, instead of simply just using the still active selection cursor to select yourself, then click on the button. A small flaw there I suppose, Microsoft?

Tagging a face manually in Windows Live Gallery Beta works too

» Download Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta