In a similar vein, but on a broader scale, Polar Rose, a company focused on digital content analysis, has released an application that brings facial recognition to all Flickr photos and users.
Polar Rose is a separate site from Flickr, but it uses Flickr's API to enable users to import their Flickr photos for instant facial recognition and friend identification. Since the site uses Facebook Connect, creating an account and integrating it with Flickr is a two-step process that takes just a few seconds (though the import process will take much longer).
Once the import is complete, select the Name button to start naming the faces that Polar Rose has identified. As you start to type, Polar Rose will auto-dig through your Facebook contacts or site contacts to help you name the selected face.
Based on the face/name entry, Polar Rose will then display a gallery full of photos for the same face, and you can click on any of the photos that don't match the name of the specified individual. The steps are then repeated for each unique individual in your photo album. The best part is that your Flickr photos will now automatically show the names of identified faces as Flickr notes. Plus, those Flickr notes link to a collective Polar Rose gallery of photos of that individual.
If for any reason Polar Rose inaccurately identifies a person, or its unable to recognize an individual, you can click to edit the tags and add that information yourself. Of course, those tags are then automatically added back to the original Flickr photo as a note. With Polar Rose, you can also edit or add people tags to other users' photos, so you can help the system better identify those faces in the future.
Flickr has been pretty quiet about the news, but savvy users would be well-served by checking out Polar Rose to automatically add some organization to their photos.