Free image hosting service - Yandex Fotki

Yandex’s photo hosting service – Fotki, has implemented Face.com’s facial recognition technology for quick and easy tagging of photos. The service can now automatically recognize human faces and “recognize” previously tagged people.

After someone has been tagged in photos uploaded to Yandex.Fotki a couple of times, the service learns to “know” this person and starts suggesting common tags when the user needs to tag new photos of this person. All the user has to do is verify the tag for it to appear on the photos. People in photos uploaded to the service can be tagged with their Yandex.Fotki account name or with any other name.

Tagging allows for quick and easy photo search. This is especially useful for finding photos with a specific person. Using photo search on Yandex.Fotki, one can easily find all photos tagged ‘Ivan’ or ‘brother’ within one user account. The service can also find and show all photos of a person with a Yandex.Fotki account uploaded to different accounts on the service, if they have been tagged with their Yandex.Fotki name.

Users can tag photos in their own account, as well as photos uploaded by someone else. Tagging is possible only if it was allowed by the owner of a photo. The owner can also remove any tags made by other users.

Having been available on the market for quite a while, Face.com’s facial recognition technology has successfully been implemented in public social networking websites. In fall 2010, Yandex acquired a minority stake in Face.com as part of its startup assistance program.

Yandex.Fotki sees over 260,000 new images uploaded to the service every day. Yandex.Fotki is a free photo hosting service providing an unlimited storage space for photos.