Tagg is a newly launched iPhone application that uses offline facial recognition to detect the faces of your friends in your photos, so you can tag them and upload them to Facebook or post them to Twitter. The app takes advantage of new frameworks in iOS5, like CoreImage, for example, which among other things also enables dead simple face detection. Because of this, Tagg only works on devices running iOS 5.0 or later.
The app itself is really easy to use. You add people from your address book on your phone, Facebook or Twitter to start, then you either snap a photo or choose one from the camera roll to begin tagging. Tagg automatically recognizes the faces in the photo and highlights them with a red square. You just tap on the square and enter the tag.
When picking the person’s name you want to use as the tag, you don’t have to scroll through a long list – you just start typing to automatically filter through the contacts you imported into the app. Alternately, you can use the iPhone’s voice input to speak the name of the tag instead. When tagging is complete, you then share the photo on Facebook or post it to Twitter. It’s all pretty straightforward, and thanks to Tagg’s simple design, you don’t need a tutorial to figure it out.
For the most part, Tagg worked well for me during tests, but I have to note that it did completely crash more than once, dropping me back to the homescreen. Clearly, there are still some bugs to be worked out here. It’s also not quite as advanced as its competitor AutoTagger, but then again, that app, too, has been hit or miss in terms of accuracy and stability. The great thing about AutoTagger, however, is that when it works, it automatically recognizes the faces for you, so you don’t have to tag them yourself. But unfortunately, AutoTagger doesn’t always see the faces in my photos, so it’s hard to recommend it. (I’m also not a fan of the big banner ad at the top).
Instead of monetizing via ads, Tagg is 99 cents, and is available here on iTunes if you want to give it a try. Tagg isn’t perfect, but after a little more bug fixing, it could easily become a regularly used utility for posting tagged photos to social networks with minimal effort.