I posted last month about a media search tool for faces in photos posted on the Internet. I didn’t give it much thought until this morning, while listening to twip, the gang were discussing about the new iPhoto features announced at Macworld.
(Yes yes this is old news, but I don’t follow Apple stories.)
So, iPhoto now has face recognition features. This is not new technology in itself, but they demoed the ability to automatically tag photos with the Facebook profile of your friends ( you have to give the full name and address). Then, Facebook users browsing your profile can tag other people in the photo and these will be automagically synced back to iPhoto.
If this becomes more integrated with social networks and a public search for all photos is made possible, it would be a great tool for organizing personal albums, reminiscing the past and finding hidden gems in your old photos. Imagine finding out you were in the same photo ( in the background) with a close friend, only you met years later. Or finding a
However, it would be harder to pretend to be somewhere else (“I’m sick”, “I’m stuck in traffic”). You HAVE to pray no one took a photo of you and uploaded it to the internets. With almost everyone on the street carrying a camera (or a cellphone), you have to pray hard. Potentially, a camera pointed to you at all times. Street photographers will have to think twice before uploading photos of other people.
On the other hand, it will be easier to identify folks who pretend to be police officers and harass photographers.
As Coal said, ” It’s a pandoras box I tells ya!”.
