If you post a lot of photos of yourself and friends on Facebook, you know what a chore tagging can be, but you still do it. What's the point of sharing pictures if your friends can’t find them? While Facebook has its own facial recognition feature, it often fails. Today Face.com launched Klik, an iPhone app that promises to do better. We gave it a try. Klik is supposed to recognize your friends from other photos you've previously tagged in Facebook, so you shouldn't have to manually tag to “teach” it who people are. But that rarely worked in our tests. From a sample of photos that included 10 Facebook friends , Klik recognized only one person. However, after tagging them myself, Klik learned and unfailingly auto-tagged subsequent photos that I shot in the app or brought in from my camera roll. One caveat: When you're hand-tagging a group of friends, Klik's "Tag" buttons overlap and make it tough to determine whom you're clicking on. If you get it wrong, you won't be able to re-tag, and will have to "teach" Klik by using another photo of your friend. Klik’s engineers need to correct that pronto. But here's where Klik shines: Once you've tagged a photo, you can send it directly to Facebook, something you can't do from your iPhone's camera roll. Klik also offers "people-enhancing" filters and a community stream within the app for following friends. Think of it as a people-only version of Instagram where you can add retro-style filters and location information and build a community of friends to follow. Klik scrawls the name of friends you've tagged across the pictures and lets you choose from a sometimes-humorous list of descriptors, resulting in captions like "Hanging out at UTA Route 11 Ave with Liz and Michael." Here's how to get started:
- Download Klik from the App Store.
- As soon as you open the app, it will ask you to connect your Facebook account. (You can alsoyou’re your Twitter account.)
- Take a photo from within the app or tap to bring up the camera roll from your phone.
- Watch Klik identify Facebook friends. For those it can't find, it will add a "tag" button for each face, so you can choose from your Facebook friends. (If the person isn’t connected to you on your Facebook, you can’t tag them.)
- Add filters and a description and share to the Klik stream (optional, unlike with Instagram), Facebook, Twitter or email. Otherwise, you can just save it to your camera roll, but it’s more fun to share.