4 Best Free Facial Recognition Software For Windows

Here is the list of Best Free Facial Recognition Software for Windows. Using these software, you can easily find similar looking faces in your photos. All of them are popular file manager with facial recognition support, so you can maintain a large collection of photos with ease. These software would ask you to tag or make profile of a face in a photo, after they detect faces, and then the software starts to find and recognize other photos with the same face. All these mentioned software can also detect faces in group photos, and lets you preview the faces in photos.

Using Face Recognition while managing a large collection of images with faces is a good way to organize photos. You don’t have to tag similar looking faces every time you see them. You just have to tag few of them, and these useful software will look for all the images with that same face all by themselves.

You can go through the list of facial recognition software for Windows and tag and recognize faces in images.

My Favorite Facial Recognition Software

I like Picasa the most. It offers an intuitive interface and highly advanced face recognition support. It is quite easy to work with and helpful in managing large collection of image files using its face recognition feature.

You can also check out the list of best free Monitor Calibration Software, Green Screen Software, and Video Broadcasting Software.

Picasa

Picasa is a free photo manager that is also one of the best free face recognition software out there. It asks you to tag all the photos of same person, and then when you add another photo of that person, it will identify the person in the photo and will automatically tag it. As you keep adding more photos of a person, its facial recognition for that person will keep improving, and it will be able to identify even difficult photos of that person (like, photos with partial face, or photos with side view of face). Not only that, if a photo has multiple people, it will be able to correctly identify the people in the photo that you have already taught Picasa about.

Based on the face recognition, you can find all the photos of a person. This is very helpful if you just want to find all the photos of someone specific.

Do note that the accuracy of facial recognition in Picasa depends on a lot of factors. The first and foremost is that you need to provide it many photos of the person that you want it to recognize. The photos should be clear and would be helpful if they are of different poses of the person so that Picasa can accurately construct a profile of that person. Also, the learning process of Picasa never stops. As you keep adding more photos to it of the same person, Picasa keeps improving. So, its important that when Picasa automatically gives suggestion about a person in a photo, you can confirm to Picasa whether it is correct or not. Either response will help Picasa do better facial recognition of faces in your photos.

Along with facial recognition, it also offers basic image editing, and we have already included it in our list of best free Red Eye Removal software.

I really like Picasa and use it everyday. Though, the support for this software has been discontinued, but you can still download and use it for free. It is an ultimate solution to easily organize photos using face identification feature. It is a really helpful software when you have a large collection of photos and you have to tag every photo according to the person in the photos.

Fotobounce

Fotobounce is another popular file manager for images that supports facial recognition while managing a collection of photos. It detects faces in a photo pretty well and displays them all as a list. The interface is okay, but not that easy to work with. For this software to perform face recognition, you have to tag persons’ photos. First, Fotobounce detects and shows all the faces in images under Unidentified Faces. Photos with similar faces can be seen organised as Unknown Persons. Now, you have to name (or tag) these Unknown Persons. So, whenever you add a new photo of the same person, it will recognize it and put it under the tagged person’s profile.

In People and groups, you can see all the named persons that you have tagged. You can also preview them and apply some basic edits to it.

It worked well for me. However, many times during my testing of this software, Fotobounce was not able to recognize even those faces which looked exactly the same as the one I’d already tagged. It was pretty annoying as I had to tag them all by myself. All in all, it works fine and helped, to some extent (not as Picasa), manage my large collection of photos. The only win it has over Picasa is that it loads files a bit faster.

Note: This software is ad-supported.

Windows Photo Gallery

Windows Photo Gallery is a popular image organizer with facial recognition support. Using facial recognition is easier than all the other mentioned in the list.

To get started with it, you have to include the folder where all of your photos reside. Go to File>Include. Next step to do is Batch People Tag. This process may take a little time while it detects, recognize, and sort photos with faces, all at once. The results are most of the time satisfactory. Once it is done processing, it gives all the suggestion for similar looking faces. You can start by naming a person and as soon as you do this, a profile will be created for that person. So, whenever you have a new photo of that same person in your computer, it will show the person’s photo as a suggestion on his created profile and ask for verification.

During my testing, it worked pretty okay, most of the time. Also, the interface is nice and found it easiest of all to use. I really like the face recognition feature of Windows Photo Gallery for its ease of use as well as its speed.

Digikam

Digikam is an open source photo manager that supports face recognition. Digikam offers an easy to use work interface to manage a large collection of image files. However, it is not as accurate in face recognition as other software in this list.

Also, it doesn’t work the same way as any other software in the list. For this software to start facial recognition, you have to select People tab, on the left. After this, you have to scan  collection for faces. You can simply choose to detect faces, detect and recognize faces, or just recognize faces. If you haven’t yet tagged or named any face, you would have to detect faces first. When you have identified a number of faces, it can also recognize the people shown on your photos.

I rate this software perfect for managing a collection of image files. However, in terms of recognizing (or even detecting) faces on photos, it’s not really that great. For me, using facial recognition was not easy, and did not even work some times.