I selected a small batch of photos to upload to my new RIYA account. It is still in Alpha testing stage but seems quite polished so far. 

Riya doesn't have any limits to the number of photos you can upload nor any bandwidth limitations. Riya is not a hosting service however and only keeps a 800x600 version plus a thumbnail of your uploads. They also ask that you do not use the service to host pictures for other sites. Fair enough.

At the centre of the service - which aims to name people and objects on your photo - is the address book. If another Riya user has identified a person with the same email address they will start recognising them automatically. They use the email address as the unique identifier, after-all many people will share the same name. Thing is, will everyone you take a photo of have an email address or one that you know?

There seems to me to be one major limitation to Riya - the number of photos required for the thing to auto-assign. I uploaded 30 of various people, I named and set an email address for the first four and hoped the few duplicates would be auto-named. I waited for an age for the firefox-styled throbber to stop throbbing.. it didn't.

The instructions call for at least 1000 photos to be uploaded, which seems an awful lot to me. I was going to put a call out for submissions on this blog I could use but realised that without a name, many photos of the same person/people and individual email addresses it wasn't going to work. 

One photo I uploaded had five people in the shot. Only three of these have the 'Who Is This' drop down box but you can click on the picture and draw a square round the face to add more. I used this picture to add a name - another screen popped up asking for more training examples for this person. It is here that a sliding scale shows they set 10 pictures as OK and 30 as great for auto-recognition. Well, I dont have 30 pictures of the same person. It seemed quicker to manually add names to each photo.

I dont really see how Riya is going to be successful. You need loads of pictures of the same person or object for the software to auto-recognise. So that limits the service to family group shots. I guess when 300 users upload and name a snap of the Eiffel Tower all subsequent uploads will recognise it. What happens when people name things such as 'girl in park' or 'lifeguard on beach'... and what if your gran doesn't have an email address? Have I missed something important?

It is still an alpha test and some bits are not implemented. Icons for email, print, download and blog under each individual image do not do anything as yet. You can add tags to each picture. Clicking on a thumbnail should load all pictures for that person - that resulted in a no photos found message even though I had named 7 pictures with the same person. I cant see anyway to delete pictures either.