The rise of the digital camera has lead to a huge increase in photography, but has also consigned many pictures to the depths of a hard disk.

Part of the problem is that with so many photographs on file, it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. Filenames rarely give any indication of the subject matter, and image thumbnails may be of little help if you can’t remember which folder contains the image you’re trying to track down.

That’s where Facebubble, an application developed by HP Labs, comes in. Its face-recognition software analyses all the photographs stored on a PC and sorts them into groups according to who appears in each image. It will also allow you to find subsets of pictures that contain two or more people.

Demonstrated on a touchscreen PC, the program is slick and intuitive. It displays all of the faces it finds within the photographs in bubbles, with the size of each bubble determined by the number of photos in which the person appears. The bigger the bubble, the more that person has been photographed.

Touching another face brings up a second set of bubbles, showing all the pictures in which both this second person and the first appear.

On its own the application would provide a powerful tool for organising photographs and allowing people to find what they’re looking for, and combined with Facebook or other social networks it could create a huge and automatically updated network of images.

The application is not yet perfect – it may consider a baby in a hat to be a different person from the baby without its hat, for example – but researchers are working on solving these problems. They also say that they are hoping to develop the software so that it can recognise photographs of a person taken over a decade or more, despite the inevitable signs of ageing that emerge over time.

Facebubble is not yet publically available, but researchers said that a finished product was not far off.

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