Israeli facial recognition tech startup Face.com made quite a splash when it launched Photo Finder, its first Facebook app, back in March. It soon followed suit with a new app called Photo Tagger, a tool that is capable of finding photos of people that were uploaded to Facebook albums even if they remained untagged by users.
The auto-tagging app was only available in private beta so far, but today the company is debuting the public version of Photo Tagger. It’s free of charge, and it’s awesome.
Here’s how it works: after you install the app on Facebook, you can select any public album (either their own or from friends). Photo Tagger then scans the photos, batches subjects into groups using its facial recognition technology and suggests tags for faces it has identified as such. Confirmed tags are then pushed directly onto Facebook, mirroring the social network’s privacy settings, and the result is a custom album made up of tagged photos.
You have to try it out to see how it works for you, but Face.com claims faces can be recognized regardless of facial expressions or the lighting, quality, backgrounds, angle and focus of the pictures.
This turns Photo Tagger into quite an impressive social search engine for faces on Facebook, where millions of images are uploaded to albums every week. It also doubles as a handy notification tool, because it has a system in place dubbed Face Alerts that lets users know when pictures of them appear on Facebook, with or without tags.
Face.com says the private alpha edition of Photo Tagger attracted over 30,000 users and identified 5 million faces on Facebook within three months.
For an alternative, take a look at what Polar Rose is doing.
