When copying a collection Picasa fails to pick up a lot of XMP face data.

[Stanley Burr]

When moving my photo collection to a new computer Picasa fails to pick up a lot of the faces whose data has been written to XMP on the old computer.

I embedded the face data for all my photos on the old computer using Picasa's "Experimental" command. Exif-tool shows that the face meta-data is present for all the faces after copying the photos to the new computer.

However when Picasa on the new computer finds a set of newly transferred and scans them for faces it fails to read in the XMP data for a lot of the faces. It does find some. The problem appears worse for photos containing multiple faces, although I can't see any pattern in which faces are picked up and which are not. For example, in a photo with 3 faces Picasa might correctly label the middle face in the XMP list, while for other photos it's the first face while ignoring the other two.

Many of the faces whose XMP data has been ignored appear to be ones that I have tagged manually so since they are not detected by Picasa's automatic process re-tagging them would be quite laborious. I can't be the first Picasa user to have encountered this problem. Has anybody else had to deal with the issue? I have tried importing the photos to the new computer using Picasa's import feature, but the result is the same as copying them across using Windows. The only other thing that I can think of is to try increasing the sensitivity of Picasa face detection using the slider.

I am still happily using Picasa along with PicasaStarter to view and manage my photo collection over multiple computers and many disks. Thanks for the great PicasaStarter tool.