VuAlbum was launched roughly 3 weeks ago on facebook. http://apps.facebook.com/vualbum
VuAlbum is a full-featured photo app that uses computer vision to automatically tag and index the objects in your photos (it works well on videos too, however facebook doesn’t allow object tags in videos, except user-ids), and allows you to organize, search, and share your albums based on this tagging.
We’ve also added unique cool features such as search by tag (doesn’t exist in any other photo app on facebook), create a new album by collecting photos that share a theme/topic or set of tags.

Recently, we also added cool imaging features such as make a collage, view a slide show, etc.

VuAlbum has just crossed its first 1000 monthly users, we look forward to the first 100,000 and beyond.

Currently, we face a tricky tradeoff. The tradeoff is simplifying the user experience and UI of vuAlbum, at the expense of performance and a slow response time.
Some friends and advisors argue that users don’t like to think too much, and by asking them to select object categories, we’re asking them to do too much thinking (and extra clicks)
if we let users click on “tag all” and don’t specify categories, the app would have to attempt to search and recognize every object the engine is aware of, which is time consuming — our engine has close to a couple of hundred object detectors at the moment, and growing every week. This has a few implications:

1) It’s costly for us to have the engine look for two hundred objects in our photos, when you maybe only interested in natural objects (tree, flower, etc), or scenes (beach, sunset, sky, cloud etc)
2) It will take longer to look for all these objects (we are running on tens of nodes on Amazon EC2, not hundreds, or thousands)
3) It’s likely that if you search for 200 object detectors rather than 40 or 50, that you will get a lot more false positives (tags that aren’t in the photo)
4) Most heavily tagged photos (such as on Flickr for example) have on average about 12 tags that are objects, the rest are descriptive or higher level tags, such as beautiful, peaceful, funny, or travel, sports, etc.

The thinking behind having the user guide the engine to what class/category of objects they care about was to the user’s benefit– to get the photos tagged quicker, and to not produce tags that are irrelevant to the user. We thought that if you are interested in sunsets, beaches, and trees, you would’d care if we found cars, bikes, and mobile phones in your photos. Hence, we asked you to select a category or two. But, if the extra clicks are painful, we will oblige and eliminate them.

Visit our vuAlbum fanpage on facebook, http://tinyurl.com/2e87y6k and share your thoughts on what you prefer. We are always listening! Thanks.

Thanks

Vufind team