When you want PicsMatch to learn about Aunt Alice, you need to create an ID entry for her in the program, and then manually search your photo gallery for one or more images to associate with. PicsMatch then takes this identity card you've created and scans your computer looking for other photos. This approach is cumbersome because you need to think of all the people you want to tag right up front. It's also heavy handed, since it requests high-quality photos like those from driver's licenses or passports in order to set up the ID cards. I got pretty good results without such images--which is good. Honestly, how many driver's licenses of friends or family do you have stored on your computer?

Issues like those make PicsMatch feel unpolished and clunky. And even though it's a desktop photo organizer, it doesn't currently support RAW images, limiting its usefulness for advanced photographers.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

The newest version of has a face tagging feature as well. But unlike Picasa and PicsMatch, Photo Gallery just locates faces in a photo--it can't identify them. You open an image file and Photo Gallery helpfully shows you that there are several faces within it. But the rest is up to you: You click on a face and either type someone's name or pick an existing name from the list, over and over again. If you have a lot of pictures with people in them, that can take a while.

Maybe the next version of Photo Gallery will connect the dots by identifying faces like Picasa, but for now it's only halfway there. That's too bad, because it is free, works on your original files (not Web copies), and even works with RAW files--all the stuff that's missing from the other programs.