Web 2.0 Review: Riya Photo Search
Riya, the online photo search tool, is an experimental tagging tool for photographs developed by a group of researchers and engineers interested in face recognition and text recognition. At this point in the software’s development, I don’t see a lot of practical applications for the average recreational photographer, but for the professional photographer who has thousands of photos, I see this technology having tremendous potential for automatically tagging and searching volumes of photographs.
Immediately when you register an account on the site you are warned that “Riya is seriously in ‘sobetaithurts’ mode” and that “Riya will be unstable, s..l..o..w, buggy, inaccurate, and could lose some (or all) of your tags”. But, the developers appear to be committed to researching this new technology and are very interested in learning from their users. In order for the automatic tagging technology to work properly, they recommend you use only high resolution JPEG files that include the date and time indicator from your camera and that you upload at least 1000 photos. Scanned photos or photos with poor lighting are not recommended. Again, this technology seems more applicable to professional photographers than the average recreational photographer.
The tool requires you to download the Riya photo uploader. The Riya Uploader allows you to upload multiple images at a time. The system requirements for the Uploader are listed on their website. Because of its infancy, many of the features they plan to include, such as flickr integration are just not quite ready yet. Once photos are uploaded into Riya, you need to manually tag your photos to start to train the tool to recognize the faces in the photos. After you have trained Riya to recognize individuals in your photos, the software will begin to auto-tag the rest of the images in your album. According to the sites FAQ, it usually requires you to manually tag approximately 30 images before the software is trained to recognize the faces.
Overall, this new technology is fascinating. The search capabilities and auto recognition features of Riya appear to be quite complex and unique. The site does have great support and help features and a pleasant interface. Although I do not see any practical applications for this tool at this time, I am very interested to see how this technology changes and improves over time. This automatic face recognition technology and advanced searching technologies are very powerful and may have some social implications we are not yet aware of at this point.
References:
Riya Photo Search Web site: http://riya.com/
The Jamboriya Blog: http://blog.riya.com/
Immediately when you register an account on the site you are warned that “Riya is seriously in ‘sobetaithurts’ mode” and that “Riya will be unstable, s..l..o..w, buggy, inaccurate, and could lose some (or all) of your tags”. But, the developers appear to be committed to researching this new technology and are very interested in learning from their users. In order for the automatic tagging technology to work properly, they recommend you use only high resolution JPEG files that include the date and time indicator from your camera and that you upload at least 1000 photos. Scanned photos or photos with poor lighting are not recommended. Again, this technology seems more applicable to professional photographers than the average recreational photographer.
The tool requires you to download the Riya photo uploader. The Riya Uploader allows you to upload multiple images at a time. The system requirements for the Uploader are listed on their website. Because of its infancy, many of the features they plan to include, such as flickr integration are just not quite ready yet. Once photos are uploaded into Riya, you need to manually tag your photos to start to train the tool to recognize the faces in the photos. After you have trained Riya to recognize individuals in your photos, the software will begin to auto-tag the rest of the images in your album. According to the sites FAQ, it usually requires you to manually tag approximately 30 images before the software is trained to recognize the faces.
Overall, this new technology is fascinating. The search capabilities and auto recognition features of Riya appear to be quite complex and unique. The site does have great support and help features and a pleasant interface. Although I do not see any practical applications for this tool at this time, I am very interested to see how this technology changes and improves over time. This automatic face recognition technology and advanced searching technologies are very powerful and may have some social implications we are not yet aware of at this point.
References:
Riya Photo Search Web site: http://riya.com/
The Jamboriya Blog: http://blog.riya.com/
posted by Rebecca at
3:36 PM
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