Here's the problem face ID is trying to solve: You've got thousands of photos on your computer, and buried among them are a few dozen pictures of Aunt Alice. But how to find them? They're spread across many different folders, with unhelpful names like Thanksgiving04, Vegas_trip, and 100808. That picture of Aunt Alice holding her prize-winning quilt might as well be in a locked filing cabinet in an abandoned warehouse in Newark

Increasingly, programs are trying to help you identify and track the identity of faces in your photos, so you can later just filter by "Alice" and automatically see all the matching pictures. Here are three programs you can try to get a taste of the future of photo management.

Picasa

is a free photo organizer that's been around for years, but only recently has Google added name tagging to its list of goodies. And it's pretty cool: After crunching some numbers in the background, Picasa does an admirable job of identifying all the faces in your photo collection. (You can that shows Picasa's name tagging in action.)

Identify a face, and Picasa then adds that name to all the other instances of that person in your photos. That's right; after you tell Picasa, "this is my mom," all the other photos of mom will be automatically labeled for you. It's like magic.