Filed under: Photo, Web services
Riya: Really intelligent photo sharing?
A new photo-sharing service? Faugh. We're too jaded to get excited about anything like that! But wait, what's this? Riya (formerly Ojos) is a photo storage and sharing service that claims to be able to automatically tag photos with face-recognition. Yes, that's right: You no longer have to go through the 700 pictures of your first-born and tag them each with his name. Not only can Riya recognize faces, it can also read text and recognize other objects like, say, the Eiffel Tower. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch got his foot in the door of an alpha
version of Riya and was very impressed. And if it does all it claims it
can do, I'll be impressed, too.Via Street Tech.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tara 'Miss Rogue' Hunt said 2:48AM on 11-04-2005
Hey Jordan,
Thanks for the pre-view plug! (did you email to get on the alpha?)
Oh...I should mention that Riya is about Photo Search, not storage or community. The idea is that Riya helps you auto-create some significant metadata so you can search photos in general...or just your own.
I hope it meets your expectations!
Tara
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geoff said 11:13AM on 11-04-2005
Imagine taking a shot out on a street of your family with stangers walking past. Would it automatically identify the stangers that are also Riya users? That would be quite weird and wonderful.
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Tara Hunt said 3:17PM on 11-04-2005
Well...unless you had the email addresses of those people, it wouldn't automatically detect them. It's both a privacy and an accuracy issue, which is why we use specific digital signatures for each face.
Now, in the future, you will be able to do a 'similarity' search in the public domain (the photos that are marked publicly viewable only) where you may find a match on a person...
Tara
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Munjal Shah said 4:51PM on 11-04-2005
As Tara said, we are focusing Riya as a new type of search engine that can look inside your photos and recognize people. Think of it as a super charged google images with a special feature to privately search only your photos. In terms of privacy, we only recognize people you already know - see our site for more details.
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Samuel Lago said 3:02PM on 11-05-2005
I got wind of this just a few days ago, I posted a q on the MS/image forums about the ability to scan an image and have it do a pass to recognise any text on that image and automatically insert it in text format into the images meta-data.
Lo and behold they are doing it, someone linked to them but its invite only :( still they were courteous to my inquiery, of which I expect will only have incresed thanks to download squads coverage.
I can't wait to try it!!
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Deran said 1:07AM on 11-07-2005
What happens in the case of twins or triplets? lol
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