Imagine this. You connect a digital camera to your PC for transferring photos and the software is able to recognize family members and friends in the photos by their faces.
Well that’s something new coming in the new release of Windows Live Photo Gallery - it will include a special "Face Recognition" feature where the software will automatically recognize different faces in in your personal pictures and will also let you add those names as tags.
The first beta is expected sometime in September. LiveSino (English), LiveSide and ZDNet have more on what’s coming in the next release of Windows Live.
This will be something like running Riya facial search* on your desktop though just limited to faces as Photo Gallery cannot read text contained in your photos. Evernote can however do this for you.
1. Picasa Web Albums vs Windows Live Photos
2. Vista Photo Gallery vs Live Photo Gallery
*Update (July 25): Please note that the above screenshot is just for illustration purpuse and is done using the current version of Windows Live Photo Gallery with a picture from Riya visual search.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/software/windows-live-photo-gallery-facial-recognition/3966/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
I wonder how companies such as Picporta [http://www.picporta.com/] will score against this. Hmm..
Written by Vijay on 07.24.08
Interesting that the pictures contain Asians only.
Are they trying to use the stereotypical joke?
That Windows Live Photo Gallery can differ people who look the same?
Written by Mgccl on 07.24.08
So we need to add the pictures of our relatives in some folder first for recognition?
Written by iamatechie on 07.24.08
@mgccl: Actually, I think that’s because the picture is from a Chinese web site. I think you’re the racist one.
Written by anon on 07.24.08
Is that an actual screenshot or a photoshop? Looks rather like the latter…
Written by Lukas on 07.24.08
This ad photo is taken by me and uploaded to Riya. I don’t know how do you get it?
Written by Yancheng on 07.24.08
I’ve run the M1 Wave3 Windows Live bits. That screenshot? It’s a fake. Photoshop-ware. Shame on who ever put that together.
Written by anon2 on 07.24.08
Microsoft always has intentions to invade into every other domain. It can try acquiring companies like face2match.com, recogmission.com, etc.
Written by Abhishek Ballaney on 07.24.08
Hmmm..This Would be Cool…
Written by Joy on 07.24.08
How it will display the names of persons.This is coooollllllll
Written by kasim on 07.25.08
Did the Sun rise from the west ? For once , Microsoft is doing something better than Google. Is this a new beginning ? If they can recognize those complex faces, whats from stopping MS to recognize and index celebrity and ‘in news’ people and provide a better image search experience. With this addition, MS will be needing a TON of new powerful servers , image processing is a resource intensive task.
Written by Ronny on 07.26.08
like any other microsoft software, its going to a processing power hungry tool.
Written by zwanderer on 07.26.08
That’s a good move from Microsoft. Waiting for this service.
Written by Nicholas on 07.26.08
Look right behind Shan wei wei, there’s a guy whose face is clearly visible. How come that’s not selected? Or is it just that it wasnt tagged.
Written by Rishabh on 07.28.08
Wow! That’s good news for us. But how about the same faces but not relative at all? How they recognize it?
Written by watzabatza on 03.20.09