riya

I have been excited about riya long before it was even launched, and even more once it opened to the public and I started using it. There is so much to it that I have no idea what to start with, so let me look at it in terms of its usabiliity for me, 1)as a visual search engine and 2) as a photo storing and organizing tool.

1. Riya – Visual Search Engine

Firslty, riya is a visual search engine that lets you search through millions of photos for 1) people, 2) text inside photos, 3) objects on photos and more. It searches for whatever you are looking for inside each of these millions of photos uploaded to its database by users, for instance check out results for ‘ipod’ here. After you get reults, you can filter them even further by;

• people that are on the pictures (many of the pictures may include different riya users with their ipods)
• albums that image is part of
• date image was taken(not uploaded)
• location that was assigned to picture by the user who uploaded it
• tags people assigned to image

By default riya will sort images by using it’s own rules but you can also sort images by date or popularity.

2. Riya – By Far the Best Online Photo Management Tool

Riya let’s you store and categorize your photos online. The coolest part is that using its face recognition technology it categorizes(auto-tags) photos for you. All you need to do is to quickly train riya by selecting some of the photos and tell it who are the people on these photos. More on training here

Once you done training, let it search your uploaded albums and find all photos for every person you told it about. It will create virtual album for every such person and put it in ‘My People’ section of your account(Awesome, huh). As any other software, it can make mistakes from time to time in such cases just click on the photos that are not a match and eliminate them from the set. Before you can start uploading photos, you need to register and install riya’s uploader program that handles bulk photo uploads.

And there is more

By looking at the code of each uploaded photo it can determine the date when it was taken and display it in the ‘time’ section of your account letting you browse and access your photos by dates. It’s truly impressive. And of course, as on any other photo sharing website there are also options to tag your photos(ex; birthday, funny) and to make them either public or private.

And be ready for this, riya is completely free and there is;

• no limit on the number of photos you can upload (on photo sharing website flickr you can upload only 20 MB for free)
• no limit on the monthly usage

Enjoy!

Side note: It had a million photos uploaded in the first two days after launch and seven million photos uploaded in the first seven weeks

Additional Links: riya virtual tour, riya has even bigger plans for future, check out soon to be reviewed like.com which is another service launched by riya guyz

Technorati Tags: riya, photo, image, search, engine

Tagged: image tools