Create your own Face Movie with Picasa 3.8

Last month Google released a new version of Picasa, the image organizer and viewer, with several new features like Picnik integration and batch upload to Picasa web albums. Among these new features, my favorite is what they call Face Movie.

A Face Movie is essentially a picture slideshow but centered around a particular face.

Face movies create a movie based around one person both figuratively and literally. Instead of the usual transition from one photo to the next, the images align themselves to the face in the photo. This creates an extremely smooth viewing experience which allows the person in the photos to remain the focus rather than the transition effects themselves.

A video is worth a thousand words.

Before you can create a Face Movie, you need to make Picasa identify the person you want to make the movie of. To do this, open an album or a directory of the person’s photo and let Picasa detect the face. Name the person whose face Picasa has detected and let the software identify all images where the person’s face appear. Once that is completed, this person’s photos will appear under the People section on the left side of Picasa’s interface.

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Click on the name of the person to display the photos. Now you can either manually select the photos you want to include in the movie or let Picasa automatically do it. Either way, click on the “Create Face Movie” icon beside the thumbnail of the person’s face. Picasa will create a movie automatically. You are allowed to make minor adjustments like transitions, add audio track, set dimensions etc. The movie can also be uploaded directly to YouTube.

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Related: Create Ken-Burns style video slideshows from your photos

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