This article was published on August 18, 2011

Deja Vu uses image recognition to organize your visual memory


Deja Vu uses image recognition to organize your visual memory

While it’s common to take visual notes of things you want to remember using a mobile phone camera, organising and keeping track of those images can a pain. Deja Vu, an app from Switzerland’s Kooaba, aims to change that and it’s just launched Evernote integration, making it even more useful.

Deja Vu is an iPhone app and Web app that lets you take smarter ‘picture memos’. Image recognition technology is built in, meaning that many book covers, CDs, DVDs and wine labels can be automatically identified, along with pages from participating magazines and newspapers. If the technology gets a match, the service will title and tag your image for you, helping you to make best use of it in the future.

Whether or not it gets an image recognition match, all photos are time, date and location stamped and uploaded to Deja Vu’s servers so that you can access them via its website too. Both the website and iPhone app allow you to browse your image notes on a map, or by keyword and tag searches.

It’s very much like ‘Evernote for photos’. While Evernote can recognise text in images, it can’t recognise and organise products like Deja Vu does. So, it’s only logical that Kooaba would hook up with Evernote via its API, and that’s what’s happened today. As the second video below explains, connecting your accounts on the two services is easy. Once done, a new ‘Deja Vu’ notebook appears in Evernote, containing all your images, complete with their descriptions and tags.

Deja Vu’s Image recognition isn’t always instantaneous, as a queue can build up at busy times, but from our tests it’s accurate on supported products. If you’re always taking photos to remember things for the future, Deja Vu is well worth a try.

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