That being said, face recognition software provides some very promising prospects for home photo organization and manipulation. It would be fantastic to be able to download a series of photos from your camera, click a button, and allow your computer to sort through them, categorizing each image by who is included in it. A series of photos could be divided into “stacks” – 13 images with Mom, 42 with your brother, another 40 with you, and so on. The same image would even appear in multiple places if done correctly, depending on how many people might be in the same image. Unfortunately, the prospect of uploading your photos to Facebook for such certainly isn’t safe if you ask most people, but the question is, is it feasible.

As the developers at Facebook have been working through the difficult steps to make such sophisticated technology available on their website, so too have private developers. While some products of this nature have been available for a few years at a hefty price, a company called Applied Recognition has released a handy and completely free program called Fotobounce that does all the above scenario asks, and even a bit more. It allows you to keep your images safe from the perils of the Internet while providing all the features you want in facial recognition software.

To give it a try, follow this link to Fotobounce’s website and get the program installed on your computer. The initial process is quick and requires very little input from users. Keep in mind though that the program requires Adobe Air to be installed on the system. Once installed, open up the program and take a look around. The interface is clean and simple, although the free product does include an advertising banner across the top of the screen.

To begin, choose the folder you would like images to be scanned from. Fotobounce will then automatically evaluate every photo from that source, categorizing each person as “unidentified faces.” Simply click the Unidentified faces tab on the left toolbar and sort through them, naming different people. Once you have identified everyone, you can click on one name to bring up every image they are found in. From there, you can automatically upload a series of pictures of one individual to Facebook or Flicker.

The power of Fotobounce is pretty incredible, and it takes a lot of sitting and fiddling with the program to understand everything that it can actually do. With a little time, however, you can have Fotobounce sifting through your entire photo collection, organizing it for future reference. No one blames you for not wanting Facebook to go out and automatically pull your face from the crowd. Still, face recognition software is pretty handy, and it can take a lot of the hassle out of photo organization.

The main requirement is a webcam, as it is used by the software to recognize the user’s face. Faces need to be registered and associated with Windows profiles. This step is best undertaken right after installation of Blink. It is a one time process to setup the face recognition system properly.

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Two basic steps need to be completed for every user account. The user needs to look into the webcam during the configuration, so that Blink can add the face to the database. Once the face has been recognized the Windows username and password need to be supplied. Those are then automatically used by Blink! to log in the user if the facial recognition was successful.

From that moment on, registered users can log into Windows by looking into their webcam. This works on fresh starts, on locked computers, after hibernation, standby and every other possible computer state.

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It is however still possible to log in normally by entering the password of the account with the computer keyboard. That’s a fallback if the webcam happens to be not available at that time, or the face recognition software fails to recognize the face of the user.

Blink! can be disabled at anytime, which takes effect on the next login attempt. The software is freely available for personal use. Downloads for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 are provided on the developer website.

This surely sounds nice because it increases user-friendliness. Most users do not like passwords at all because they have to memorize them to make them effective. With face recognition this would not be a problem anymore because they would only have to smile into the webcam to start the operating system of their notebook.

It remains to be seen how secure the system is. It would not be a great system if someone would for instance get access by using a high quality picture of the person who uses his face to access the notebook. I don’t think that this technology will become mainstream one day.

The NEC Lavie C Series will come out this September in Japan. Notebook stats for the top range model are 1 Gigabyte of Ram, Core Duo 2 T7500 processor, Blue-Ray Read-only drive, a 160 Gigabyte hybrid hard drive (256 MB flash memory) and a 15.4″ LCD screen with WXGA+.