Ever look for a picture on your desktop and find that you
have about a million pictures labeled IMG_0001.jpg? What if you didn’t have to
label each picture? Wouldn’t it be nice if your pictures were automatically labeled
according to who was in the photo?

That’s the idea behind a new startup still in the Beta stage
called Riya™. The company was started by a group of facial recognition
researchers and engineers with a vision to help find every digital photo online.

Simply upload your photos and begin tagging them with names
and e-mail addresses to train Riya’s™ software. Once Riya™ has learned how to distinguish
the faces in your photos it begins tagging them with the names of the people it
recognizes. What’s more, this service is completely free!

For right now, Riya™ is concentrating on photos that users
load. However, in the future their goal is to crawl the web and index random
photos to make images on the web even more searchable. Of course, there are
some security and privacy concerns associated with this type of technology, but
already Riya™ has come up with some inventive safety measures.

For instance, if I take your photo, I cannot load it into
Riya’s™ database and expect to find your name. If your photos had been tagged with an e-mail
address, I would need to know it in order to find you.

Additionally, Riya™ can recognize text in photographs like
street signs or labels. This type of technology will be a welcome help to all
of us who would rather not spend our Saturday afternoons labeling photos.

Click here to see a video demonstration of Riya™ in action.