Riya Online Photo Sharing Reviewed
If you like sharing photographs online then you will probably be interested in a relatively new Web 2.0 company called Riya.
They are an online photsharing service with a slight twist.
Sure, they have most of the other cool things that you would expect from a photo sharing site like unlimited uploads, hotlinking, sharing with friends etc, but also one extra thing…
You can teach Riya to recognise your photos!
What that actually means is that it can recognise certain people in your photographs by use of biometric facial recognition software.
After the system has recognised a certain face, it will put a little box around the face to indicate that it has recognised a face, and then you can tag that box with the name of the person. It can also recgise multiple people in the one image.
Riya learns so in future it will recognise that person and tag photos of them automatically.
This is a very handy use of biometrics.
Riya can also recognise text in a photo and transform it to text that you can alter. One very cool application for this is that you could theoretically take a photo of an essay and then upload it to Riya and have it transferred to editable text.
All very cool stuff, but it is still in Beta and it is far from perfect. For example the software does not always recognise faces and tagged faces cannot always be recognised in additional photos that you upload. You also need to download a little program to your desktop that allows you to upload your photos to their system. The upload process is a little slow and if you have more than 500 photo they recommend that you leave the system uploading overnight.
One major concern that I had was the issue of privacy. When Riya recognises a face in a photo, it prompts you to tag the photo with the name of the person and their email. I simply was not comfortable doing that with photos of my friends, whose permission I did not explicitly have to be giving their personal information to an online service.
No amount of privacy policy reassurance would ever convince me that this was a good idea and so that is one thing I will NOT be doing on Riya. A massive database of people’s photos, names and emails, all attained without those people’s explicit permission is something that strikes at the heart of my Libertarian conscience.
On the other hand there is no denying that this is a very adept use of technology and I think it will be hugely popular.
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