How can you write/convert Picasa's People tags to the EXIF data?

Question

I use Lightroom for my workflow, and I tag photos with people's names so that I can find them faster.

Since Lightroom doesn't have the "Faces" feature, I want to use Picasa's People feature for this purpose, but I don't want to work constantly with both of them. I'd rather use Picasa to tag the photos with the name tags every time I import new photos, and come back to Lightroom for the rest.

I couldn't find a way to make Picasa actually "tag" the photos (in the EXIF) with the people's names. Is there any plugin / script / ... that can make this happen?

Answer 1

Picasa stores faces information in the .picasa.ini files:

[test.jpg]
faces=rect64(1eb1929f885e),15441a598f9f1866
backuphash=29866

The id numbers can be found in the contacts.xml file which stores all the contacts of your pictures:

<contact id="15441a598f9f1866" 
  name="Test Test" 
  display="Test" 
  modified_time="2010-05-13T17:19:46+01:00" 
  sync_enabled="0"/>

Several programs can read these files and modify the EXIF accordingly. For instance:

• faceextract.pl ( command line perl script )
• AvPicFaceXMPTagger (GUI)

Answer 2

Good news, this is now natively supported in Picasa

Just check

Tools > Options > Name Tags > "Store Name Tags In Photo"

You can also force Picasa to start the writing process using

Tools > Experimental > "Write Faces to XMP"

Verify this worked with using an EXIF viewer to verify a normalized XMP region with a name was written to the file. (Online EXIF viewer: http://regex.info/exif.cgi )

Bad news, Picasa is now hard to find because it was shut down by Google.

Answer 3

Use this link for exactly what you want: Add face recognition to lightroom with picasa

Picasa can save metadata to files, and Lightroom can read them.

But be careful to follow the guide. In Picasa its not enough to get peoples names associated to a photo. You have to tag the photo as well to have the data stored in the file. And in Lightroom you have to select the photos afterwards, and then click Read Metadata from files.

AND the most annoying part is it only works with jpg. I havent been able to make it work in dng..

Answer 4

Lightroom does have a "people in photo" metadata option, although you have to change to show the 'ITPC Extended' option for it to show.