Less than a week until the next major release of PicsMatch! Be on the lookout for PicsMatch 3.7 coming the week of 9/21.

Major Features include:

• New Facial Recognition Algorithms that bring Better Search Results
• Enhanced “Suggestions” grouping to help you get started
• Sort your Collections by “Faces Only”
• New “Find Misses” brings up Faces of people that have not been Matched yet.
• Wedding Slideshow Creator V.1 Released
• Upload your Photos to TwitPic, Photobucket, Facebook, and Flickr!

PowerPoint is a great product to create slide shows. It is easy to create slides, add music and effects. Getting photos into PowerPoint is little more difficult. You have to import size and format. PicsMatch makes that so much easier. Select the photos that you wish to import and right click. A menu will appear with options. Select import to PowerPoint. PicsMatch will open PowerPoint and place one formatted photo per slide into the show. You can then add a title, effect etc. What a time saver? PicsMatch works with Office 2003 and Office 2007 on XP and Vista PCs.

PicsMatch 3.5 now has a new way to help you get started with creating Matching IDs of your family and friends. A Matching ID is the folder where all of your photos of specific people are filtered. Pictures of Mom, Pictures of Brother, Pictures of Me, etc…

This new feature makes finding images of people much quicker. Not only that, but it brings out who you may have missed or who you actually have a ton of pictures of. Ever have a friend that somehow sneaks into your pictures? Who would have thought that I had 34 pictures of Adam? Sneaky little guy.

When I had PicMatch 3, I had 11 Matching IDs, now with the new Suggestions Intro, I currently have 42! Pair this with the Facebook auto-tagging/uploader, and PicsMatch 3.5 is an integral part of my media sharing. I’m encouraged to create more Matching IDs because it makes my tagging for Facebook or Flickr easier. I’m better at uploading to my online accounts because PicsMatch makes valuable suggestions of great photos. It works hand-in-hand.

For more information on the Suggestions Intro, check out this video.

Recently my parents celebrated their anniversary. I wanted to find a picture of the two of them to use for my card. I fired up PicsMatch and went to the Advanced Search. In the Advanced Search, you can perform queries of individuals, groups of people, during a holiday, during a special event, even in a specific year.

My first Advanced Search I selected the Matching IDs for my Mom and my Dad and got back 68 photos that contained both my Mom and my Dad.

Now I specifically remember a picture from when my folks went on a trip to Alaska that I really liked. I took another swing at Advanced Search and tightened up the requirements. This time I selected my Mom and Dad then clicked on a Special Event we created for their trip titled “Alaska Trip 2007.” With this, I had three photos appear that had both of them in it from the trip. Got it!

I found the picture I was looking for but needed to make a few adjustments. I double-clicked on the image to open the editor, tweaked it to my liking and then we were almost finished!

With PicsMatch’s Advanced Search you have the ability to zero in on that ONE photo out of thousands.

Check us out at www.picsmatch.com, where you can get our latest version for only $59.99.

GEAR DIARY REVIEW OF PICSMATCH
by Adrian Leibas

You know that itch you get when you buy a new digital camera, the type of itch that makes you capture everything from kids to office supplies, at least I hope other people do that too :o) My wife is one of the smartest people I know, but I couldn’t count the times when I get a scream from the computer room, with her trying to manage all of our digital photos or asking me how to find certain pictures…that’s where Picsmatch facial recognition program comes to the rescue!

Picsmatch is a program that utilizes facial recognition software to sort, organize, and tag photos for many different uses from scrapbooking to Facebook or Flickr. When I first got the program to use I was a little skeptical about the accuracy of the facial recognition software, if it did work it would probably be very hard to use the program…wow was I wrong.

When you install the program and run it for the first time it goes through an initial setup that scans all of the pictures on your computer and tells you if they are match worthy or not, meaning the facial recognition software can ID the face.

If photos have a head tilted or with sunglasses it will tell you they are not usable for a Match ID. The next step is creating a Match ID, this allows you to put a persons name, assign them to one of the prepopulated groups, and then select photos to use as the ID. After you have tested the images you click done and now you have a new photo ID set. With an ID set you can now begin to search for photos.

My wife does a ton of scrapbooking, and most of her time is spent trying to find usable photos; I can only imagine how fast it would be if she could use this program. This is probably the most time consuming aspect of using this software, however, the time that you are saved in the long run is well worth it…trust me!

Lets say my wife is making a scrapbook for her dad and wants photos of our son Cooper from the Easter Holiday, she would use the Advanced Search tab to select Cooper, then the Easter holiday, then click on Search….yeah it’s really that easy.

How sweet is that, now there is no need to search through 5 or 6 different folders and go through thousands of different pictures, because that’s how my wife was doing it. I know she could have sorted them by date, but if I was not home this was hard for her to figure out. Now what if she wants to find photos of Cooper and her Dad from Easter, not a problem at all with the Advanced Search feature.

Picsmatch is not only a search tool for your pictures, it also can handle some various photo editing that allows you to keep those memories just the way you want them. After running the search for the photos you would like to use all you have to do is select the photo and click the Edit. Say for instance you want to get the red eye taken out of a photo, once the edit screen is open all you have to do is click the “Red Eye” function and Picsmatch locates all instances in a photo. Just click Auto Fix, and TADA! it’s done, this video shows it: red-eye edit. There are a few other minor editing tools to add backgrounds and such also.

Once you have edited all of the photos the fun doesn’t stop there. And again this is where the help of my wife’s habits come in good use…mainly her Facebook addiction. Picsmatch allow you to add comments and tag photos, this comes in handy when getting photos ready for online use.

After you have Tagged and added whatever comments you would like on the photo it makes uploading to Facebook really easy, because you now don’t have to tag every person in the Facebook editor.

Just right-click on the photo you want to use and select “Upload to Online Account”

Then select Facebook, as you can also see this works very well with Flickr(just at the time of this review I still don’t have a Flickr account set up). It then gives you the option to select an album that you would like it assigned to and who you would like to allow. This is a very nifty function in Picsmatch, and some may find this worth purchasing alone.

And if you now look at your Facebook page, there is your photo with tags and comments ready to go!

This software is awesome, and so far I have found many different uses for Picsmatch. The tools in Picsmatch don’t stop there: there are functions to print, email, share, and burn a photo video directly from Picsmatch. Overall this is one of the best consumer applications I have ever used; Picsmatch is a product that can be used by anyone and everyone from professional photographers to parents looking to keep track of their little one’s pictures. If Picsmatch had more powerful and detailed editing tools it would be the Holy Grail of photo software in my opinion; regardless, I still highly recommend it.

What I like: Ease of use. Ability to search for photos by person, date, holiday or special event. Minor editing tools. Ease of use with online accounts like Facebook. Price, currently $49.99!

What I don’t like: Has the ability to push some computers to their system limits. Can sometimes take longer to locate photos when creating matches, this probably goes away with higher computing power. Only has options for Facebook and Flickr, some would like more options. Only has basic editting tools.

MSRP: Currently $49.99 as it appears they are still running their Mother’s Day sale.

Where can I buy: Picsmatch is currently available only directly through their company by visiting their website Picsmatch.

Facebook is one of the fastest growing websites on the net today. There are currently over 1 BILLION pictures uploaded to Facebook every month. If you’ve ever uploaded pictures, one of the best ways to share them with the people in the photos is to “tag” them. In Facebook, you click on the face of the person you are tagging then entering their name below. This is a really cool feature but can take some serious time and effort if you upload hundreds of photos with multiple people in them.

Enter: PicsMatch’s Auto-Tagging feature. This feature uses the facial recognition feature to automatically tag your Friends in PicsMatch and then quickly upload them to your online account. With this feature, PicsMatch cuts the most painstaking task users have to do in Facebook out of the process. Simply select the picture or album that you want to upload, enter any album information you’d like, and click upload. That’s it! Your pictures are then entered into your Facebook account, captions and tags in tact.

PicsMatch 3.5 will be released in the next couple weeks. There are a lot of new features to cover, please stay posted for more information.