Riya Face Recognition Photo Search

Riya is a new Facial Recognition Photo Search tool, though still under development in alpha, that promises to revolutionize the way you search photos on the web.

What is Riya about?

“We are a group of determined face recognition and text recognition researchers and engineers who believe it is time for a new type of photo search that uses technology to look inside and automatically tag photos. We hope this will revolutionize how people “see” the world.”

And their vision is

“Riya is more than photo search. Our goal is to help you find every photo of yourself on the web. We want to help you recover every moment, every place you’ve been and all of the people you’ve met along the way.”

You can search by both tags you assign and the auto-tags they add to the photos. Some examples of these tags include: People in the photo (by name or email address), Folder name (the original folder you assigned gets transferred to the metadata), Scene (photos within a folder, grouped in time periods), Comments (made on photos by yourself or others), Text (detected within photos, ie. signs) and so on…

Riya lets you search for photos of yourself (by name or email) or events you attended (by name and date/time) within your friends’ photos. You can start training Riya to recognize faces or browse by your Albums, Scenes, Date and Text auto-assigned to your photos.

Please note that Riya Facial Recognition Photo Search is still in Alpha, i.e. a very early stage of development. And you require login and Internet Explorer. Riya is totally free!