Creative, commercial photographers.

Looks familiar – Facebook trials face recognition software

July 6, 2010

As many a photographer will confirm, uploading masses of photos to Facebook, the social networking site, and then tagging each of the individuals in these picture, can test the patience of even the most tolerant creative photographer.

At the moment the process of uploading and tagging photographs on Facebook is entirely manual. Yet according to a recent article on the Facebook blog, facial recognition software, the same kind used in digital cameras, may be employed in the future to assist users when tagging photographs.

After a picture has been uploaded to Facebook the facial recognition software will detect where the faces are in the picture before selecting them and prompting the user to answer the question, ‘Whose face is this?’ at the touch of a button. This will remove one of the most manual and time-consuming stages in Facebook photo tagging.

Sam Odio of Facebook, wrote in a blog post,

“With this new feature, tagging is faster since you don’t need to select a face. It’s already selected for you, just like those rectangles you see around your friends’ faces when you take a photo with a modern digital camera. All that’s left for you to do is type a name and hit enter. Cool, huh?”

Odio, product manager for photos, added,

“The tagging feature is just the start of improvements we’re trying out. Stay tuned for future posts about other work on browsing, uploading and tagging.”

This software, which has yet to be rolled out to all Facebook users, means that a creative photographer in Leeds, who captures hundreds of photos, will no longer need to laboriously plough through each picture tagging their friends individually. The software will recognise the people in the images and with more than a million photos uploaded per day, according to Odio, this will speed up the tagging process no end.