That’s the technorati tagline for alpha testers of Riya, a new online facial recognition system. I was lucky enough to get an alpha testing account and started uploading my images this evening. Here are some of my first thoughts.

First, how cool is it to upload your pictures and automatically have them tagged with the names of the people who are in them? Of course, I started with what would appear to me to be the most difficult photos possible for such a system, that of my girls. Their faces change from month to month, and it threw Riya for a loop from the get go. Then again, you have to ‘train’ Riya, and since I only uploaded 65 photos or so I can understand why it might have a little bit of difficulty. However, it was nice when an entire set of pictures were grouped together and allowed me to tag them all at one shot.

But outside of that, the fun kind of ends. First, Riya doesn’t respond very appropriately to the question of privacy and instead relies on the old ‘don’t you have pictures online already?’ line. Because actually, no, I don’t store my entire photo gallery online. There’s no reason for thousands of my family photos to be out there for some idiot to scarf up. Yeah, I don’t mind sharing a couple amongst family and friends, but not all of them which Riya kind of needs you to do to make it work.

Their borderline childish answer to a serious question including them using strawmen like “This is scary and invasive sounding. Aren't you concerned that the government is going to use this to spy on us?" as an FAQ leads me to believe they’re not going to have an adequate level of respect for my privacy.

However, let me also say that Riya is set up to be an online photo sharing site much like boogerFlikr which I do not use for just such reasons. The reason I signed up for Riya is because I had a similar concept a while back and wanted to see it in action. I actually don’t plan on uploading all 5,000 pictures off my harddrive.

What I really would hope for is the ability to scan all my local photographs, detect and recognize faces, and update the exif data on each image making it locally searchable through various programs (like Picasa). Having some faceless company hold copies of my images just isn’t very comfortable to me. Plus, not all of my photographs are completely mine. When I shoot weddings, while I hold the copyright to the image, it doesn’t mean I can start selling them to Time magazine. When I shoot children’s photography, I get model release forms to allow me to do that, but I can’t at certain events where there are multiple people who don’t sign the form (yeah, I know there are ways to get around that, but I’m not a complete asshole).

The other thing is the upload applet you have to install. A) It uses Java which I have a slight disdain for (worked too long in the language and was constantly underwhelmed) and B) you don’t get to see what pictures it plans on uploading. I have tons of photos that are in a RAW format and I wasn’t sure if it was going to send those 4 meg files or not (doesn’t appear to do RAW) And I uploaded many more than actually showed up on the site and I wondered why it simply discarded so many (this may be a bug since it’s alpha and I will be writing them to let them know).

Overall, if you store your photos online anyway, this looks to be a cool tool. I’ll probably upload a few hundred more images nonetheless just because I think the technology is wickedly cool and I’m jealous that they were able to pull it off while I’m here still daydreaming about it. But until the application can actually populate my files’ metadata with the detected faces, I’m just not sure how much use this is going to be to me.

Technorati tag - soalphaithurts