Windows Live Photo Gallery Will Get Facial Recognition Soon
Microsoft has done a fantastic job with Windows Live Photo Gallery, and it’s definitely become my favorite way to manage photos. There’s been no mention as to when the next version of Windows Live Photo Gallery will be coming out, but one thing that you can look forward to is facial recognition.
News of this comes from a Chinese site (LiveSide has translated it) that had the pleasure of interviewing a Windows Live manager. Apparently once Windows Live Photo Gallery recognizes the faces it will be able to add tags to each photo indicating who is in it. The tags, however, will only be viewable in Photo Gallery.
I’m extremely anxious to see just how well this works. Ironically enough I just got done going through all 7,000 of my photos a few weeks ago and tagged every single family member that was in them. In total it took me about 8 hours to do (broken up over a few days), but it was well worth it. This feature would have obviously saved me a lot of time… assuming that it works fairly well.
Some of the first things that I’ll be trying when the Beta comes out is whether it can recognize your face when it’s been obscured or cut off in a photo. For example, what if the person isn’t looking directly at the camera… would it still be able to recognize the person when only part of their face is visible? I’m a bit skeptical about its accuracy in situations like those, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed!
Enjoyed the post? Subscribe to our feed to get a daily dose of CyberNet!
Tags: Freeware, Software, Windows, Microsoft, Photos, Windows Live
Related Posts:
- Download Windows Live Apps Early
- New Windows Live Photo Gallery Includes Flickr Uploader
- Windows Live Gallery Released
- More Plugins Available for Yahoo! Messenger
- Should Microsoft Un-Bundle Apps From Windows?
Here’s the creepy part though: what if the UK started using this technology combined with CCTV? That would let them make maps of your trip through a city containing every single move you made…
I hate to tell you this Pieter but that technology already exists for CCTV an is in use in the UK- I am not certain if it is all cities but I do know of it’s use in Manchester- heck they even demonstrated it in their museums a few years back.
Don’t fear the situation though, it is used for good let me assure you, as a med student who will soon be working in the NHS I hate the current government and their awful attempts at usng medicine as a publicity stunt- but this tech has helped me in the past. If you are worried- get a hat.
I was interested in this software from Microsoft, until I read that in order to use it you need Internet Explorer 6 or later. Why is that?
I thought Microsoft was embracing other browsers, like Firefox for instance.
Sorry Microsoft, I’ll pass on this one. For the time being Flickr and Photobucket are just fine.
Hey Guys - I wanted to let you know that this technology already exists on a site called http://www.wihli.com/.
You can manage your Facebook and Flickr images in there and add tags etc. It also does facial search -> you input a picture of a face, it finds the face and then searches your image gallery for faces using the uploaded picture as the keyword.
Someone needs to get on them to build commodity value around the service.
I should also add http://www.wihli.com/ works properly in IE and Firefox … so bah to Microsoft …
It doesn’t really use the browser that I know of. If you’re on Windows I’m sure you have IE 6 or later installed, don’t you?
Of course, there are a few different sites that can do this. The point is that this is actually a desktop application that will be able to analyze all of your photos… even the ones you don’t feel like uploading to the Internet.