Fotobounce

Photo management software comes in many varieties, but Fotobounce is a new one. Like many others, it's free. It lets you upload, store, and share your digital snapshots on a secure Web site, even directly from your phone, and designate trusted individuals who can access shared photos, but plenty of other sites offer all that, too. It can upload your photos directly to your Facebook, Flickr, and AirSet pages, and that's neat, but not unique. It uses facial recognition technology to help you tag and organize your photos. Come again, Mr. Bond? Yes, Applied Recognition's Fotobounce uses once-secret spy tech to tell your brothers apart and quickly identify them in newly saved photos.

Fotobounce's setup wizard scanned our designated library for images, adding them automatically to its interface. A left-hand console let us invite friends to access our images, designate images to share, create albums and collections, log in to Facebook and Flickr, and set options. Fotobounce works just as well as or better than most other photo-sharing tools we've tried, with some neat twists, but we really wanted to see the facial recognition tech in action. Fotobounce was way ahead of us, and it displayed counters of photos, people, and unidentified faces. We clicked on Unidentified Faces, and a page opened with thumbnails displaying faces extracted from our image library. Clicking an icon on any image let us enter the person's name in a pop-up. We could also realign faces in the thumbnails for better recognition and delete images, since some faces were fuzzy and some images that weren't faces slipped through, such as the wood stove that resembled a medieval knight's helmet. As we identified faces, Fotobounce added them to our People list and suggested matches from the remaining images that we could confirm or reject. After a while, we could just click on faces in our People list to identify people in new photos.

Fotobounce's facial recognition feature is extremely cool and surprisingly effective. Don't be put off by the process of identifying faces for the software so it can help you identify individuals in photos as you load new images; it's easy and actually a whole lot of fun. See for yourself; again, it's free.