Saturday evening: You have some friends over for dinner, and you are showing your large collection of photographs since you last met your buddies. You remember you had this awesome view of a sandy beach you visited in Greece, but if only you can find that image in time to show it.
Riya steps in: Being the smart kid you have been, you made sure to let Riya take care of your gigantic photo collection, the last evening, so today you just need to log onto the free service Riya offers and just search for ‘Sandy’ and Riya brings out your collection of images tagged as Sandy.
You would say that this is nothing new, a simple tag search is what happened here. But looking closely you see a couple of pics with another friend of yours. Now whats he doing here ! What happened here is Riya recognizing your friend Sandy in a couple of pics and showing those pics too.
This is good. This is technology at work. This is not a regular photo searching/tagging service. This is something more than a SQL Query being run against a tag. Well maybe at the end it is. But whats interesting here is the way it all starts. the way you train and educate Riya about looking inside your pictures. You start by telling the system who is who in the pictures.
You can also sync your address book with Riya, so that every time you identify a new person for Riya, you can pick their name and email automatically from the address book instead of wasting time by typing the details. You can also choose to search a photo set for pre-identified people from the address book. Riya will search and auto tag the shortlisted pictures.
In addition it has another nice feature of specifying the privacy settings for a set of pictures. Whats better than automatically controlling the album permissions by looking at the pictures in the album itself. I persume Riya looks at the identifiable people in the pics, looks them up in the address book, and ties it to the permission framework (I might be wrong).
When I look at a new concept, I see how much of a practical problem the concept is solving for the masses. Riya promises to solve most of the searching and tagging problems with any computer user who has a considerable sized photo collection on the disk(s) or on the web.
Would there be any kind of API support for the framework? Would love to see a Media Center extension, that lets me do all the searching from my TV. Thats the easiset way for Riya get into our living-rooms and be a part of the lifestyle.
The Riya team looks well experienced and promising too, to keep up with the promises and opportunities Riya can open.
Technorati tags: Riya,recognition
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