Shannon Whitley

Tara Hunt says c’mon into Riya! I tried the service today and had a blast. Riya is fully acknowledging that there are still some rough spots, and you should expect things not to work completely, but they are in Beta after all.

I uploaded about eight albums worth of my photos. I’m not really into taking a lot of digital pics. For me, each album is about 5 to 18 pictures.

Riya does an awesome job of recognizing that a face exists in the photo and makes it very easy to assign a name to the face. I haven’t seen it perform any wizbang, auto recognition yet, but the face labeling feature alone makes this service way cool. It recognizes text in the pictures using OCR and you can easily convert the text to tag your pictures.

Riya even recognizes faces in pictures on the wall behind your subjects. One of the funniest things happened when I uploaded our Christmas pictures. I was labeling my son’s picture in front of his new Millennium Falcon and his Star Wars action figures. Suddenly a little box appeared that said, “Who’s this?” — It was a picture of Harrison Ford as Han Solo that was part of the packaging on the Star Wars toys. Should I have added Han Solo or Harrison Ford to my contact list?

I give Riya a big thumbs up. For me, it’s both a fun toy and a useful way to tag your photos.

Technorati Tags: Riya, photos, tagging, Han Solo, Star Wars