Riya, first impressions

Riya's alright.

It's a photo sharing service, like Flickr, but with face recognition. It's probably the coolest web application I've ever used.

Imagine uploading a few hundred photos somewhere else. The only way to know who's in them is to mark them all by hand. With Riya, it will show you faces, and you identify them. Once it's seen someone's face enough, it will start to pick them out automatically. Now all you need to do is confirm that those faces actually belong to that person. It's suprisingly smart, and will truly amaze you from time to time. Of course, the system isn't perfect yet, and there's some errors to catch, but the decisions are pretty spot on most of the time.

Of course, there are other problems. The UI isn't up to snuff yet (no batch operations like mass deletion, no easy way to expand/change the training for a person's face, can't view the full size picture while training). Once these problems get sorted out, this is going to be one of the greatest photo sites around.

Of course, if you want to check some of my pictures, drop me an e-mail and I'll send some over to you, post haste.