Toronto: A new algorithm can change and simplify the way you find photos among the billions of snaps on social media sites such as Facebook and Flickr.

The search tool developed by Parham Aarabi from the University of Toronto and his former student Ron Appel, uses tag locations to quantify relationships between individuals, even those not tagged in any given photo.

Imagine you and your mother are pictured together, building a sandcastle at the beach. You're both tagged in the photo quite close together, researchers said.

In the next photo, you and your father are eating watermelon. You're both tagged. Because of your close 'tagging' relationship with both your mother in the first picture and your father in the second, the algorithm can determine that a relationship exists between those two and quantify how strong it may be, they said.

In a third photo, you fly a kite with both parents, but only your mother is tagged. Given the strength of your 'tagging' relationship with your parents, when you search for photos of your father the algorithm can return the untagged photo because of the very high likelihood he's pictured.

"Two things are happening: we understand relationships, and we can search images better," said Aarabi.

The nimble algorithm, called relational social image search, achieves high reliability without using computationally intensive object - or facial-recognition software.

"If you want to search a trillion photos, normally that takes at least a trillion operations. It's based on the number of photos you have," said Aarabi.

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