Also, none of the photos are stored on вЂ™s servers. Also noteworthy is the fact that from a privacy perspective Photo Finder piggy-backs on the usersвЂ™ Facebook settings and does not alter them in any way. Tagging that occurs through the app is stored in metadata accessible through the Photo Finder app alone. It is important to note that Photo Finder does not add or alter FacebookвЂ™s own photo tags.

The social tagging feature within Facebook Photos gives a major boost because it can use those tags to train its system.

Photo Finder will then go back and re-scan the albums after its initial scan to identify newly added photos. My personal installation of the app required it to scan 79,449 photos which resulted in 11,933 tags of myself and my friends.

Photo Finder scans the photos of users and all their friends, along with вЂњother albums in your wider network where thereвЂ™s a high likelihood of your (or friendsвЂ™) appearances.вЂќ To understand the sheer volume of backend work required, consider the following statistics: The first 150 users in вЂ™s system required 20 million photos to be scanned, resulting in 30,000 identified faces. In this respect claims to be able to perform facial recognition on all one billion photos currently uploaded into Facebook every single month using only a few machines. The second requirement is to have the technology be scalable. This applies to everyday photos that suffer from such issues as low resolution or bad lighting, or where faces are obscured with sunglasses, for example. It was designed from the ground up as a low-cost platform to meet two specific requirements: The first is recognition of вЂњFaces in the WildвЂќ. The facial recognition technology was developed from scratch by the team over a year and half. Photo Finder will prompt hits via FacebookвЂ™s вЂNotificationвЂ™ window. Users can also track specific users by flagging them for the вЂњWatch ListвЂќ. Users can search manually for photos of friends or browse for recently tagged ones. With Photo Finder, you are not limited to your own photo collection. Competing technology can be found in both AppleвЂ™s iPhoto and GoogleвЂ™s Picasa, but those are limited to searching only your personal collection of photos (although iPhoto lets you upload them with the tags to Facebook). The only users that have veto power to alter or decline a tag are the person who uploaded the photo and the person tagged.ДЇacial recognition technology is taking off. Users can either accept, decline or identify the correct individual themselves. Once installed, the app will begin scanning you and your friendsвЂ™ photo albums, a process that requires a bit of time to complete, but the welcome screen will immediately display photos that were вЂAuto TaggedвЂ™. We have 200 special access invites available to TechCrunch readers who will be granted first access to the app, as well as preference on the waiting list. Let me put it another way: How many photos of you are there on Facebook that youвЂ™re completely unaware of? Israeli-based will help you find them with вЂPhoto Finder,вЂ™ a Facebook app that uses facial recognition to help members locate untagged photos of themselves and their friends. While Facebook makes it super easy to discover photos in which you were tagged, there is no chance that every one of those billion photos are tagged each month.

However, as with all good things, there are also drawbacks, and in this case discovery is high on the list. In fact the feature is so popular that by FacebookвЂ™s own account 1 billion photos are uploaded every month-a staggering number that makes it the largest photo site on the Web. If there is one feature on Facebook which delivers вЂњsocial utilityвЂќ magic even to the most average of users, itвЂ™s Photos.

Photo finder face recognition upload