Aha moments with Riya
So I've been playing with the Riya Alpha for a day so far and I have to say that I'm very impressed.
Riya accomplishes a couple of key Aha moments early in using the software that draw you in.
Aha Moment #1
As soon as you start uploading your photos it puts a box around faces and asks you to tell it who that person is. This is an immediate difference from regular photo organizing software and hits you with the whole point of Riya in the face. You immediately say - Cool!
Aha Moment #2
Right after I start playing with the interface there is a "Faces Unrecognized" link. When you click on this link it groups together photos that it thinks are the same person. Again it works pretty well and is very cool.
Aha Moment #3
So after about 20 minutes of playing around with it and entering in faces there comes a point when I get tired of this and start looking at some of the other photos I have uploaded. Another Aha moment jumps out when I look at a group photo that I know that I haven't looked at before and it has already labeled the faces for me. Another cool moment.
To pack 3 cool moments like this into an Alpha is very impressive and a big bravo to the Riya team for this.
However, there is a big problem that ran into that I'd like to see fixed before I would use this on a regular basis.
Big Hairy Problem #1
It misses faces sometimes. The face recognition is not 100% at figuring out faces. Yes it's alpha and yes it is true that no other software even comes close.
The more I thought about it the more I realized that it would be a showstopper for me. See - if I'm counting on the fact that it will pull up my photos and use this as a primary search tool for my photos then having it miss results is a very very bad thing.
The analogy I think of is that if you went along and tagged your photos and when you did a search some of your photos didn't appear. This would be very very distressing to me. This is actually a bigger problem than it might first appear to be. In fact, I don't think that this problem is necessarily a tractable problem. It might be that I'd be willing to go through and manually check all the photos but more likely that I'll keep the folder structure that I have in place now.
The main condition it doesn't handle well is people who are in profile (side view). It also seems to work very well inside of albums but less well across albums.
I also ran into a few smaller problems that I'm sure the team
Minor Problem # 1
The UI for picking names to assign to faces is terrible for larger numbers of names. Very solvable problem.
Minor Problem # 2
Slowness. The site is moving at a crawl right now for my photos. I suspect that this is because of all the people trying the alpha and that this is solvable as well.
So in summary - riyarocks but it's still so alpha it hurts.
Chris
