Last weekend I was playing with the new beta of Google Picasa 3, including the new Picasa Web Albums.

I’ve used the Picasa 2 desktop photo management software for a couple years now, and been mostly happy with it. It can upload directly to Facebook, and it’s not too hard to upload to my Gallery 2 site either. However, I’ve never seen the point in paying for the Picasa Web Albums photo hosting service, when I can host my own photos on my own site for no extra charge.

That changed last weekend, when I discovered the Name Tags feature in Picasa Web 3. This is what I thought Facebook was doing a while back. The idea is simple: after you upload your photos to Picasa Web, Google detects all the faces in the photos, and asks you to name them. Google then uses facial recognition technology to guess the identities of future occurrences of the same faces.

I’m trying to geotag the photos from my brother’s wedding using a combination of Picasa and Google Earth. I’ve done this before many times but now I do all my work from a non-admin account under Windows XP, and I’m running into a problem.

When I click the Tools | GeoTag | Geotag in Google Earth menu item, for some reason MSI is launched trying to find the Google Earth.msi in a temp directory in the admin user’s Documents and Settings folder, which obviously my non-admin account doesn’t have the privs to read. The resulting dialog box says:

The feature you are trying to use is on a network resource that in unavailable.

Click OK to try again, or choose an alternate path to a folder containing the installation package ‘Google Earth.msi’ in the box below.

Of course, the box below contains only the path into the admin’s profile folder, and there’s no option to change it or browse for an alternative. If I click cancel, the box reappears.