Mar

23

Riya Review

March 23, 2006 |

A few points about Riya.

First of all, great service. Love the face recognition and design of the site. I used the client to upload a good 2000 pictures so far and while there were a few technical glitches, such as error pages coming up etc., all is good. The client is definitely holding up for me. I uploaded some pictures from a trip to Italy last year and it recognized the face of Michelanglo’s David, faces of statues in the Vatican etc. It even transcribed Latin inscriptions. Now that’s what I call impressive.Riya Logo

But, given that this is a beta and I assume the Riya guys are looking for some feedback, I just want to point out a few issues (I am sure they will all be fixed after the beta):

General things:

  • can’t move pictures from album to album
  • can’t create albums
  • can’t sort pictures in albums
  • no subfolders for albums - I get the tagging idea and the idea that one can search for pictures, but when I send a link to an album to my parents - they don’t know that
  • it would be nice if I could allow certain users to see all my albums or just selected ones, but for now, we can only do this an an album by album basis
  • can’t batch edit location, tags for a certain number of selected pictures (for location, it seems to be one by one, or maybe also based on the album name), for tags, you can tag all or a single one, nothing in between
  • when searching by date, not all pictures for this date come up
  • I love the location search with the google maps interface - great idea - just make the tagging of the locations easier - please?

User interface and feedback:

  • when displaying the album, the album breaks at a random number and you have to click to continue - it would be nicer if you could just set how many pictures per page to display
  • once I am in the second part of an album and I click on a picture - once I go back, I am above the fold again and have to click my way back towards the end of the album
  • sometimes it is not clear when faces were recognized and when the recognition is going to run
  • it runs - don’t get me wrong, but the feedback the user gets is not clear
  • there are also different training modes - one, when clicking on an unrecognized face and selecting a name, will bring up a window with other pictures where the user can select whether or not that face is the same person as the unrecognized face
    • not a bad idea, but why hide this training mode which is one of the easiest of the three different modes?
  • the options at the bottom are “identify more faces” and “start autoregognizing” - there is not stop function so the user has to click the back button and there is no feedback if anything the user has done was actually recongized by the system - there is just simply no feedback
  • just a simple blinking dot (like in netvibes) is enough to reassure the user that something is being transmitted
  • a batch delete function would be nice - there is already a select with clic/control+click integrated into the manual recognition - maybe this culd also work inside an album?

    • Client:

    • I would really appreciate an option to select the subfolders I want to trasnfer - right now, I can only select a folder and all subfolders, or I have to go one by one, which, given that the recognition and transfer take a while and that riya recommends to let it run overnight, can be a bit of a hassle

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    1 Comment so far

    1. Munjal Shah on March 24, 2006 8:24 am

      Great feedback Frederic - I’m copying it all down now. We will get to work on it. You can share just an album or search result just copy the URL from the top and email it to your parents, etc. They click on the link and can see all of the photos from that search result.

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