Find Photos With Your Face In Any Device With Kooboodle MeFinder

No one wants to be that pesky person who incessantly asks for pictures of themselves that were taken on other people's phones. Kooboodle launched an app today to fix that. Aptly named MeFinder, the free app works on Android, iOS, Mac or Windows devices to automatically find pictures of you.

MeFinder goes through the photos in your friends' phones and finds those of you with its facial recognition technology, then displays how many such files there are. Your friend can then choose which of those pictures to send.

During setup, you take a short 360-degree video of yourself that develops a set of selfies for Kooboodle to use as a reference for your likeness. It then compares those stills against a set of generic faces stored in its database to refine its algorithm. This way, you won't have to keep confirming that it is indeed you in the picture like you have to on Facebook or Google+, and the app is immediately ready to start identifying pictures of you in devices. MeFinder will first go through local files and bring up photos of you. It will only search for you in your friends' pictures if you're linked via the app. Once you're both connected, you can send images of each other back and forth, and MeFinder will notify you whenever you take new pictures of each other so the sharing process is continuous and convenient. 

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Kooboodle also has a desktop-friendly PhotoFinder app that scours your computer's hard drives for images of you. It uses information such as folder names on the drive to organize your files after they are uploaded to Kooboodle, and photos taken from different devices are grouped together based on event triggers such as location and date. You get unlimited (as of right now) cloud storage when you sign up for a Kooboodle account, which is required to use all features of the app. Files are protected by what Kooboodle calls "bank level security" so that your photos won't be detected and crawled by search engine bots. The company plans to offer premium account options with advanced features in the future.

Selfie-lovers will definitely find MeFinder useful, and even the camera-shy will be able to find pictures of themselves that they like. Of course, instead of pestering your friends to send photos, you'll now be asking them to accept your MeFinder request.

Cherlynn Low

Cherlynn is Deputy Editor, Reviews at Engadget and also leads the site's Google reporting. She graduated with a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University before joining Tom's Guide and its sister site LaptopMag as a staff writer, where she covered wearables, cameras, laptops, computers and smartphones, among many other subjects.