Riya (formerly Ojos) will be opening its doors to 10 or so lucky alpha testers tomorrow morning.
Riya leverages potent facial and text recognition technology with an intelligent interface to help people make sense of the thousands of untitled and untagged photos that are building up on their hard drives (and on the web).
We previously profiled Riya (then Ojos) on August 31, 2005
I went by Riya’s offices today and met with the team to get a look at their product. According to Munjal Shah, Riya’s CEO, I am the first outsider to get a chance to bang on the live product. Given how hot Riya is right now, I consider that a huge honor.
The process starts with registration and choosing a privacy setting on your pictures. You then download a client application that uploads photos you choose to include in Riya. The actual uploading takes a while - about 4 hours for each GB of photos. Instead of waiting around, Riya will email you when the process is complete.
That’s when the fun starts. In my case about 400 pictures were uploaded. I was presented with a view of facial thumbnails of everyone in my photos. Riya asks that you begin to educate it by telling it who the people are…it then very quickly starts to auto-tag pictures with a surprising level of accuracy.
Riya also recognizes text in photos, and lets you select any area of a photo and tag that as well. For instance, you could select just the Eiffel Tower in a photo and tag it as such. Within moments, everything of importance in all of my photos was tagged. And more importantly, it was searchable.
It’s an easy step to allow friends to also tag and search your photos (if you choose), and even allow full public search.
Linking these two features - massively automated tagging of everything in photos, with search, is compelling to say the least. The folks at Riya call it “tag locally, search globally”.
Riya is going to be successful. They have real technology. And, as people use it to tag photos, Riya will create a database of unique attributes of people. Once enough people start using the service, Riya will be able to auto-tag people’s names with less and less training by the user. At that point, why would anyone try a competing service? Riya will have technology (protected by patents) and an incredible network effect as well.
Riya plans on having a destination site that will be free, and will OEM their service to other photo services. Sites like flickr can certainly try to duplicate Riya’s service, but unless they move very quickly Riya’s network effect Riya will be insurmountable.
In fact, Riya could become so ubiquitous as to actually cause real privacy concerns. One question I asked the team today was - “what if you get so much data on people that I could take a picture of a crowd, upload it to Riya, and instantly have the names of every single person in the crowd?” Apparently, their technology is not that powerful - yet. Riya’s ability to know who’s in a photo is largely based on who you are and the people you are connected to.
To fully appreciate Riya you have to see it visually. I’ve posted a few screen shots below of my experience using it earlier today.
Get in to the Riya alpha if you can. It’s going to be a popular service.
I’m surprised they are not funded by In-Q-Tel. Seriously.
I’d love to be able to take the results back to Picasa….
Yeah, one thing I forgot to mention is that you can export all of this metadata back to wherever the pictures are hosted - hard drive, picasa, flickr, etc.
Hey Mike,
The metadata sharing bit isn’t available quite yet…during alpha, we are concentrating on the technology, THEN we will concentrate on sharing metadata. It is an important part of our future plans, though.
Tara
This is going to be awesome! What a killer service. I have thousands of untagged pictures and would love to have a service to help me with this. They have something real!
Mike, you write: “For instance, you could select just the Eiffel Tower in a photo and tag it as such. Within moments, everything of importance in all of my photos was tagged.” Are these two sentences connected? Could you expand if they are? (Also, how did it tag my car in your bushes?)
I have been following Munjal’s blog and the company benefits from a down to earth, thoughtful and passionate leader.
Dorrian, Have my lawyers contacted you yet about that parking job you did in my garden?
WRT your question, you simple click on the picture and draw a box around anything (similar to how flickr does this). Unlike flickr, however, you can add tags (instead of just notes), which are searchable.
People have boxes around their heads automatically. Other stuff you have to point to manually.
Whoa!!
Now that’s cool.
Am I right that you have to upload your complete Foto Library to use the service? What kind of servers do the guys from riya plan to build?
I would like to tag something other than ‘faces’ in my ‘photo’ collection….
Riya looks extremely useful - I can’t wait to give it a spin. Oh, and it looks like you changed the TechCrunch logo - nice!
To Jeff’s point and to what I was curious about, it would be cool if people could contribute other stuff besides faces for auto-tagging into a community pool of photos (that is only used to learn and spit out tags). So Riya’s servers would start auto-tagging other objects - or even scenes, like the beach - as well. One thing I worry about for Riya (as cool as it sounds) is that I suspect face recognition will work the best to auto-tag people you take the most photos of such as friends and family. As you get more photos of the same people, you will have such a large pool that tagging by name won’t reduce finding the photos by very much without the context of where the photo was taken.
would u invite me to riya?
Alirezq, yes, I would. Unfortunately, they don’t do what I say over there.
Best thing is to sign up directly at the site.
I believe Google is also working in this area. I wonder apart from the uploading hassles and the “training time” what other switching costs will allow Riya to put up a decent fight against Google. Since Google already has image search (perhaps it is not a big leap to associate search terms with images..), I am not so sure if community or network effects really matter.
Maybe someone more knowledgeable about this can comment?
Can someone invite-me to riya please m0nz00@gamail.com
If you’re intrigued by face recognition technology and its uses for consumer photos: another interesting company is doing it - myheritage.com.
It’s kinda slow but still one of the coolest things I’ve seen lately.
They have a demo that lets you upload your own photos and check out how well face recognition works on them. They show you which celebrity looks the most like you and the results are surprising
Howdy ho! Somebody invite me to Riya plz!
ive got more than 30gb of fotos on a dedicated server. organized with a self written php applikation and i would love to that riya offering a possibility to use the service without uploading all the pictures for example with a stand-alone app or something like that.
$40 million ??? imgSeek (http://imgseek.sourceforge.net/) does something similar for free and with all source code available !
hey, can someone please invite me??
thanks
Robert
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Hi
Can anyone plz send me an ivite to Riya thing….
My mail Id: aruntuli@gmail.com
Thanks
Arun
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Am I the only one in here that thinks that this service has negative effects as well..? For example: Asume that I have a large collection of photos (as our friend hfj), almost 30gb..Surely there isn’t only me in all of them. Riya will tag all my friends and family as well. Taking the EXIF info makes it track the date also, leting me fill the location. That means I publically share all the info of the people in my collection giving the answers to who, when and where. So, statistically speaking, at least 30% of the uploaders will upload 1 picture and info of another person which riya will tag find him to other photos and tag him. That gives me the posibility to take a random picture in the street, upload it and wait to see who was he… Or I didn’t get the whole meaning of face regognitia.
Makes me think of licensing to the DoD or INS… scary, though they probably already have technology of this kind.
I do see serious privacy concerns with this as others have pointed out. In fact, I would much prefer this to be a desktop app., or at least have a desktop client app, that would allow users to choose which pictures/ image libraries to tag locally on their machines, and which to upload.
Personally, I would prefer to simply use a riya desktop app for my own pics, tag them locally, and keep them private.
Hi, i would rather like it as a desktop application too.
Wonder if there is one already or not, do you know?
Check out this new site - http://www.xcavator.net - it just launched. It’s integrated with flickr and does real image search and easily finds similar photos. They’re looking for people to try it and get the word out!
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Hey there, glad to see u.