Michael Arrington, of TechCrunch, has the first review of Riya on his site.

What is Riya? Riya, formerly known as Ojos, is facial recognition software – basically, if you upload you photos to Riya, it will ask you the names of people in the photos, and quickly start to recognise them in more of your pictures so you get a searchable index of all your photos of people.

Riya also allows for tagging of pictures and parts of pictures, so you could tag your dog’s picture with his/her name, it recognises text in pictures and it allows you to open your pictures for friends to tag and search also.

This sounds like it will revolutionise online photos – intelligent search has always been missing from photos.

Riya is, as yet, unavailable to use – it is in Alpha testing still. There is a learn more series of pages on Riya’s capabilities on their website and the option to register your interest. I did. Watch this space!