Auto-captioning photos with CAPTCHAner
I quite often have completley unachievable ideas, that have no basis whatsoever in fact or reality. So, it’s no surprise that a conversation with Craig, down the pub on Friday has sparked another of them.
It’s become a bit of a theme this year, and after my last posts on the subject – we got to talking about captioning photos. Many of my photos exist on the basis of seeing something shiny, and then taking a picture. I often have no idea what said shiny thing was – but quite often make the effort usually on Google, or Rough Guides to discover its secrets afterwards.
I encourage any account holders to tag as many photos as they want on Blakepics. But mine is a very small community, and Flickr shadows it with even its tiniest fingernail. So, why should you have to tag your own photos? Aren’t there plenty of other people out there that would do that for you?
And I got thinking about the recaptcha project. They use scans of words to present the user with captchas that will help their digitization of old texts. These “unknowns” are combined with”known” text, and the answers compared against previous users results.
So, why not the same for photos? A known photo could be presented to the user “Dog”, “Cat”, “Llama”, or even a traditional captcha. Combine that with an unknown photo, and invite users to give it a caption. According to recaptcha, there are 60 million captchas being solved every day – it’s about time we put all that to good use.
Or perhaps CAPTCHA might just become another word for blackmail. Sure, you can login to your account – but you have to do something for me first. I just like the way Captchaner, sounds (Captcha, Captioner – see what I did there?). Maybe one day we’ll see this on all of our logins.