Israeli facial recognition tech startup Face.com made quite a splash when it launched Photo Finder, its first Facebook app, back in March. It soon followed suit with a new app called Photo Tagger, a tool that is capable of finding photos of people that were uploaded to Facebook albums even if they remained untagged by users.
The auto-tagging app was only available in private beta so far, but today the company is debuting the public version of Photo Tagger. It’s free of charge, and it’s awesome.
Here’s how it works: after you install the app on Facebook, you can select any public album (either their own or from friends). Photo Tagger then scans the photos, batches subjects into groups using its facial recognition technology and suggests tags for faces it has identified as such. Confirmed tags are then pushed directly onto Facebook, mirroring the social network’s privacy settings, and the result is a custom album made up of tagged photos.
You have to try it out to see how it works for you, but Face.com claims faces can be recognized regardless of facial expressions or the lighting, quality, backgrounds, angle and focus of the pictures.
This turns Photo Tagger into quite an impressive social search engine for faces on Facebook, where millions of images are uploaded to albums every week. It also doubles as a handy notification tool, because it has a system in place dubbed Face Alerts that lets users know when pictures of them appear on Facebook, with or without tags.
Face.com says the private alpha edition of Photo Tagger attracted over 30,000 users and identified 5 million faces on Facebook within three months.
For an alternative, take a look at what Polar Rose is doing.
Amazing. This takes their price higher. I’m guessing around $100M…
Israel is back on the map again.
Why people upload their photos to facebook…
I don’t upload my photos to facebook, because its get resized!
Picasa is much better in handling photos and tagging…
Dumbest comment ever.
I also prefer Picasa for uploading photos, though I use facebook as well.
Agreed.
It is not for archival, just for sharing. If you had ever experienced dial-up, you would know. the. pain. of. downloading. massive. photos. :/
Wow, this is really cool.. yes because it free. :p
anyone still need a google wave invite?
I need one please.
I still need a google wave invite please! Jniggs@gmail.com
I need a google wave invite! U got one left? please mail me @ arnoldvriezekolk[at]gmail[.]com
I just got mine today too. Wonder if they hit a new batch per say.
The problem is that this tool also adds an annoying tag “tagged by face.com” which you have to remove manually on each pic..
I agree. Also, I find that Polar Rose’s suggestions are much better and their tool easier to work with.
br, Daniel
This is scary. Before this, if you’re in a photo and someone else tags you, it’s easy to delete and others couldn’t search for a picture of you. This allows the potential for any picture of you in it to be found by anyone – potential employer, police, parent, etc.
Sorry, but this will be bad news for a lot of people…
Sounds like a lot of work. I agree, Picasa makes this easy and it uploads to FB too.
Uploads to FB? Are you sure?
No detecting pictures. You have to select people’s albums you want to search. It seems like you should be able to search all your friends albums at once, especially if you’re trying to locate pictures that haven’t been tagged. Selecting one album at a time could take a LONG time.
I’m using Picasa’s feature but you said it uploads to FB too which is wrong I guess.
There’s a plugin that you can get that integrates nicely into Picasa for Facebook uploads. It’s either made by FB or Picasa, but it works great.
I’ve found it, thanks a lot this saved my life!
http://apps.fac...picasauploader/
it’s similar to the feature in Picasa. It recognizes the faces you have in your own album, and, you can create a profile for each face.
Very cool technology. Will save many people lots of time tagging. Great addition to facebook and what a domain!!! WOW
But yes I do agree that it is a bit scary, big brother always watching.
That looks like a really interesting application, though it still needs a little work. I’m a little interested to see just how far it can be taken. I agree that it could become very big brother-esque.
Wow. I can see this application upping the ante on the social networking war between Twitter and Facebook. At least some useful things are coming out of Israel.
A lot of common consumer/health products came out of Israel
- Disk on key (MSystems)
- Intel’s Centerino (Intel Research center, Haifa)
- Voicemail (Comverse)
- ICQ
- PillCam (Given Imaging)
and the list goes on and on.
Why is there a picture of Ashley tagged in the face shots of Suzan Hope (second row, third picture)? Pretty poor choice of examples, unless I’m missing something.
Looks similar to what Riya did (another Israeli company) a few years ago. Will be interesting to see the business plan for how they intend to keep the doors open this time around.
Until you sign up for the service, all of your pictures out there are simply tagged as “Face.com’s Character #8675309″
But when you sign up, you provide them the missing link: Character #8675309 = You = Your Facebook acct.
Am I missing something here?
This is just amazing, state of the art technology wow congrats to these guys.
Dumbest software ever. I see this going no where and getting there fast.
Great article and really good product, I’ve been using it for months now and it always catches things that I can’t believe. Great technology, great potiential and great people !
Yaron
this is an excellent service – if it can do what it says it can do – it may take off
Fail…..that’s not Ashley Banks……Ashley Banks lives in Bel Air with Will and Carlton and the rest of the Banks family. Psshhh
if this software is anything like the face recognition on the new ilife its gonna stink. this is cool and kudos to them, but dont expect this to be CIA or Casino level face recognition with people monitoring. i doubt it will work as well as they say it will. but hey maybe im wrong.
Looks like some one on Yahoo! has patented auto tagging and more…check out
tehttp://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20090171783
I will sue facebook to remove this app. I don’t want some third party technology tag my images without my express written consent.
Image signatures can later be sold or used for many purposes that we have no idea about yet and I don’t want some foreign company where I have no judicial recourse over to have such an access to my pictures.
grandpa, is that you??
just click “delete my Facebook Account” and all your troubles end!!!
Attention crackpot,
1) You can protect the images you publish on facebook from such applications using your privacy settings.
2) When you share your IP content (photos, videos, etc) on facebook you grant them a “non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license” to use that content in connection with facebook.
Take a look at the terms of use you agreed to before posting such baloney.
The screenshots tag the same girl as Ashely and Suzan. It’s okay though, she’s hot.
es un buèna ventana para conocer personas