Face Recognition Software - Will it help in Gini research and connections?

I believe, it will be nice to have a face recognition software running in Gini, that will help identify, family members in group and individual photos in the family tree or in life event occurance s.

It will save time and enable interaction with all members to understand their activities in the family circles as though we have had a conversation with them to know the happenings.

Any critics?

Do you have any software to recommend?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by face recognition. How will it make things easier? Does that mean we are all required to have cameras or pictures online?

Also, people age and their face begins to lose its youthfulness, people get plastic surgery on their face, some people wear loads of make-up and then change it to loads more make-up for a different look, grow facial hair then shave it off again, etc...

Picsa has facial recognition so if you tag a person in a picture, it will recognize that person in other pictures but I don't think it would carry over the tag to geni. I am not sure though as I have not tried it.
http://picasa.google.com/

It should work in geni, geni is integrated with Picasa albums. I'm pretty sure you can tag / identify people in photos within geni as well (haven't tried it).

Thanks Erica, I'll have to try that when I get my last 50 email merges done on this machine and about the same on my laptop. I don't use Picasa albums on line though, i just keep all my stuff on my machine. No chance of the wrong pictures getting out there that way.

Hi Erica,

There are many commercial software. However, it may be better to build one especially to work with the Gini application. There are software development kit (SDK) available for programmers to develop and integrate a solution.
If you or any one else is a programmer and Gini gives them permission to develop a solution to integrate ( as facebook and others do ) then, I will be more than happy to recommend a tool and perhaps, volunteer to get it started.

I'm not a programmer but I did work in IT so now I'm following your thoughts better. If you can post an example of what you have in mind I can forward that on (or geni will see for themselves). I agree that customizing an SDK might be doable. I think you have an interesting idea going.

P.S. We have other curators who are programmers -- I'll make sure they see this discussion.

Erica,
what he refers to is a feature, that once having selected a person's face in a photo would be able to automatically identify them in other photos uploaded. A number of social-networking sites already have this ability. It would probably be less of use or less ACCURATE on Geni, due to relatives looking alike, and the quality of older photos. But is certainly worth giving thought to.

Actually, I use Picaa for all of my photo management. The facial recognition works really well - even with old photos and family groups.

I also love the ability to tag them with locations, events, documentation types...

Jenna,

I have a photographer friend playing with Picasa right now, she's already hooked.

Can you send me a private email? I left the address in your geni mail box.

As Jenna mentioned, Picasa does it very well. I have noticed that it also does well in recognizing people at different ages. Sometimes it misrepresents but it always asks you to confirm before setting the identity. Having this in Geni would make life so much easier as we have thousands of photos on Geni but a lot have not been identified yet.