Made in Israel: MS OneAlbum Aggregates Your Buddies’ Pics

in News by Gal Mor — March 12, 2010 at 12:00 pm | 10 comments

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Let’s admit it: tagging pictures is a drag, whether you’re doing it on your computer or by online services such as Flickr, Picasa Web or Facebook.

Earlier this month, at TechFest 2010, Microsoft demonstrated a neat prototype that was designed to solve this problem. Microsoft OneAlbum  is a project that uses face-recognition and event-matching technology to automatically retrieve photos that would be of interest to you from social  networks and your friends’ online photo albums—and add them to  yours.

OneAlbum uses face-recognition technology to search for photos  featuring you and your friends with whom you are often  photographed.

How does it work? OneAlbum scans faces that appear frequently on  your OneAlbum Live photo collection and then scours your social  networks (Facebook, Windows Live, Flickr etc) for more photos of those people. When it’s finished, you will see all the new pics in your  OneAlbum collection with links to the sites they were published on.

While the face-recognition algorithms were developed by Microsoft Research Asia, OneAlbum is the brainchild of researchers from Microsoft’s Israel Innovation Labs.

The technology redefines the concept of “my album” from referring to “photos I have taken” to “photos that interest me,” no matter where they might reside. “This,” said Eyal Krupka, principal research program manager for the Israel Innovation Labs, “includes photos of myself, my wife, and my kids, from the events I participate in, the places I like, and more. OneAlbum also goes further, by organizing ‘my album’—the photos from the same event are presented side-by-side, no matter where they come from.”

Krupka said that OneAlbum could be used to spark “after-party social interaction.” since it also looks for photos from specific events. Of course, Facebook already does this quite effectively. Here’s a video demonstration with Krupka.

OneAlbum resembles another technology developed in Israel, Face.com. Here’s our latest update on Face.com. While both technologies scour social networks after untagged photos, Face.com PhotoTagger is available only on Facebook. On the other hand, OneAlbum forces you to use OneAlbum, although it scours more social networks than Face.com. When examining the privacy aspects, it seems privacy advocates won’t be pleased from either one.

More in the company index: Face.com and Microsoft Israel R&D Center.

Tags: Eyal Krupka face-recognition face.com featured Israel Innovation Labs Microsoft OneAlbum