Riya is a very Flickr-like online photo album tool, but with one very cool added feature.

Our face recognition technology automatically tags people in photos so you can search for just the photo you want.

I just tried the system. First downloading the desktop client, the uploading about a hundred photos as a test (this bit’s rather slow). Once the photos are up you go through a training process of telling Riya the names of the faces it pulls out of your photos.

The training took about 10 minutes and worked surprisingly well. After training Riya it recognised about 80-90% of the faces in my photos. Maybe not a scientific test, as my uploaded photos contained one or two of a small handful of people. But still, I’m impressed.

My immediate impression of Riya was ‘cool, but beyond the novelty what’s it for’. But thinking about it I can see some real use cases. As an example, my Dad recently switched to a digital camera and takes thousands of pictures a year. Now if Riya could take care of indexing all of those with the names of the subjects then finding photos of cousin Jo or Dan’s kid from down the road suddenly becomes a lot less of a chore.

You can take the tour to find out more and try it out, though you are warned that it’s in ’so beta it hurts’ mode and may well eat you photos, tags or even your pets without warning or recompense.