Riya alpha reviewed

While there's still no word on whether Google is actually going to pick up Riya, the service has quietly launched its alpha, and the Red Ferret has a review. According to the review, the service is currently excruciatingly slow (Riya actually recommends uploading photos overnight), but once pics are uploaded, Riya's much-ballyhooed facial-recognition technology works as advertised: "[I] spent 10 minutes manually tagging around 14 of the 46 photos I’d uploaded. The system then went ahead and correctly located and identified the remaining images with no fuss whatsoever." Riya also features text recognition, and allows shared access to tags, so that, for example, multiple family members can upload pics from Thanksgiving dinner, and as long as one member has tagged his pictures, all the rest will automatically be recognized. Sounds impressive. If Google gets their hands on this, it could mean some real competition for Flickr.

 

Tags: freeware