Linux users really love Google Picasa even though it's not a native Linux application (unpack the .deb and you'll notice some wine.exe and other such files). Reading the comments from our "best linux photo manager / organizer" post, it seems face recognition is the feature that attracts people the most to Picasa.
Well, it seems Google Picasa will have a serious native Linux competitor, as digiKam will be getting face detection and recognition - Aditya Bhatt made this his GSoC project and his "libface" (which will be used by digiKam) sounds amazing already:
An analysis of speed – if you have a pretty slow (1.6 GHz) computer, it’d take a max of 6 seconds per photo – which means less than a day for 10,000 photos, and about a week for 100,000 photos. [...] I find the speed to be comparable to Picasa on my computer.The accuracy of detection is, IMHO, similar to Picasa
-writes Aditya Bhatt on his blog
Google Picasa won our "best Linux photo manager / organizer" poll with 33% (371 votes) of the votes while digiKam came in second with 22% (249 votes).
