Paul Hammond's Blog

A while ago, I signed up to take part in the beta of riya.com; I had forgotten about it until last week when I got an invite mail to try out the service.

In a nutshell, riya.com is a facial recognition service for uploaded photos.  It allows you to submit your photos to a website, and it will then start picking out portions of those photos that “might be faces”.  It then asks you to spend a little time identifying the people in the pictures - training it if you will.  After you have told it a few times which people are which, it can then start “auto-recognising” people from any new photos you upload.  It seems to be able to pick out words too (so, maybe road signs or shop names etc) which might allow you to better identify your pictures.

Much like other photo sites, it offers the ability to tag pictures.  It auto creates a number of tags from your Exif data, and allows creation of your own tags.  You can search your photos by person name, location, date range, album (it auto-creates albums based on your uploaded file structure), or tags.  You can also mark pictures and albums as “private”, or for sharing.

One nice feature is that you can link up with other people in your contacts list, and use their recognition data to help feed your recognitions.  When you train the software, you tell it both a name and an email address, so I presume it uses this data to cross reference my recognition data with others.  This could be a pretty powerful feature if enough of your friends and family begin to use the service.

Some comments I have on the service so far:

• Firstly, it requires you to install an uploader (written as a Java application) to upload your pictures.  This can run in your tasktray, and you can set it to monitor a folder so it uploads and auto-recognises your pictures as you add them.  It will also auto-start on when you start Windows.  I was a little unsure about installing yet another tasktray application, but it doesn’t seem too bad on resources, and it does make uploading to Riya.com easy.
• The website itself is very well put together.  It uses a lot of “Windows-like” funtionality (such as drag-and-drop and mutliple selection using the CTRL key) and talks to the Riya.com services via some sort of AJAX funtionality.  The whole user experience seemed to work well for me once I was actually inside of a specific task.
• That said, there are a number of ways to get into the differing “training modes” and it took me a little while to figure out what was going on.  Not being one to read manuals, there is probably an FAQ that tells me all I need to know, but you know how it is…
• It doesn’t work in IE7 (yet), although with the level of interaction I think they can be forgiven for now.  Works great in FireFox.

I have uploaded maybe 500 photos, and it seems to have gotten pretty good at recognising those people who have 10 or more “sample pictures” that you trained it with.  All in all, it seems to do what it says on the tin really quite well.

However, now I have checked it out for the geek factor, my interest has waned a little.  I have about 20,000 photos (so far), and I use Microsoft’s Digital Image Suite to manage them.  This gives me similar features (such as tagging etc) so that I can organize everything, and it is all done on my own machine using full resolution photos.  If I do want them online, I currently share a subsection of them with friends and family via my own website.  Uploading that many pictures *just* so I can search them seems a bit much.

Now, if you could build this sort of functionality into my desktop application so that I can have an extra level of classification, then I would be very happy.  Right now, I tend to flag pictures by hand with the people who are in them, think how much time would be saved auto-tagging my pictures with names.  Of course, this doesn’t necessarily take advantage of the collaboration aspect of using your contacts’ recognition data, but to be honest I am not sure how much cross-over my photos have with theirs anyway. 

Anyway, photographers and AJAX developers out there, check it out – http://www.riya.com.  For a good overview, the tour is a great place to start – http://www.riya.com/learnMore

Wow, did I luck out.  Darren has just informed me that, as well as being my birthday, it is also Steak and BJ day. 

The ex-architect from my group here at MSN has now released a beta for v1 of his new venture – SnapTune.  To quote the website – “Snaptune One downloads songs, talk shows, interviews and live sessions directly from an FM radio to your computer automatically.  Snaptune records what you want to hear to your hard drive – just the music with no repeats!  It shows you a list of the songs playing on the radio as it finds them.  Sort, play, write, burn*, or transfer to your iPod* or other media player.”

Basically, you can hook up either a USB FM receiver, or plug the audio out of your FM radio into your line-in on your soundcare.  SnapTune will then “listen” to the radio stations you choose, and pick out the individual songs to save to your local machine.  The software will then show you a bunch of information about each song it has saved, including Amazon reviews etc.

I love the idea, but I haven’t managed to try it yet (I don’t have a radio near my computer that I can plug in), but hope to give it a go soon.  Leave me a comment if you try it, let me know what you think!

There are two great pieces of utility software that I have purchased in the past 12 months – FolderShare and Onfolio.  I have blogged about FolderShare before, but I don’t think I have mentioned Onfolio.

Onfolio is a tool for collecting and organizing information; it integrates into your browser (IE and FireFox), into Outlook and has a standalone desktop application version.  You use it to create  “Collection” files.  These are single files that pull all of the clippings you make together into one place.  You can capture links, whole web pages, snippets of a page, images, PDFs, in fact any file you can drag and drop onto the treeview, and they are all then available offline.

I have been using Onfolio in conjunction with FolderShare for a while now to ensure that all of my “information”, the stuff I care about, is available to me at all of the computers I regularly use without me having to think about it.  Each machine has Onfolio installed, and I have my Collections folder shared using FolderShare across all of the machines.  So, when I find something useful that I want to keep, I clip it to Onfolio, and minutes later all of my other machines have that same data available.  Genius.

A little while ago, my employer (Microsoft) showed how much they agreed with my taste in utilities by buying the FolderShare company, and then making the software free to all.  Now they have done it again by buying Onfolio, and rolling the product into the new Windows Live Toolbar; they have also made this product free too.  Mildly annoying since I paid for Onfolio back last year, but great news that my favourite utilities are now both part of the Windows Live family of products.

You can download the Windows Live Toolbar beta here.