So, the Riya service is now in public beta. The point behind the service is that you send it your photos, and it applies some magical image processing to recognize faces and objects. In theory, once I pick out a particular face and tag it, say, as “Matthew”, the software is supposed to be smart enough to find all other pictures that have Matthew in them and tag them accordingly. If it works well, this would be a huge improvement over the manual metadata systems that programs like Picasa and iPhoto use now. Does it work well? Beats me; I’m still uploading pictures. The one glitch I’ve had so far is that in my first batch (350 photos from 1999), the uploader got stuck on the last picture. However, clicking the “cancel” button got rid of it.
Update: a few notes. First, the service certainly does what it says; I uploaded about 1000 photos, and it has indeed auto-recognized a significant number of faces. Cool beans. A few nits, though:
- It looks like the uploader is indiscriminately uploading every file it finds in the source directory– including .NEF (Nikon RAW) files, thumbnails, and iPhoto’s data files. It’s not clear whether any of these files are in fact uploaded or skipped, because there’s no logging.
- On the web site, I don’t see any summary that tells me how many total photos I have uploaded. Oops: there it is, in the upper right hand corner.
- It’ll be interesting to see how well the facial recognition works with kids’ faces. I trained several different images of Thomas as a baby from 1998 and 1999; now I’m going to feed it some pictures of him from last summer and see how many it catches.
Tag: riyarocks
Paul's Down-Home Page 