Personal Digital Photo Research Articles

From PhotoWork to PhotoUse: exploring personal digital photo activities

ABSTRACTPeople accumulate large collections of digital photos, which they use for individual, social, and utilitarian purposes. In order to provide suitable technologies for enjoying our expanding photo collections, it is essential to understand how and to what purpose these collections are used. Contextual interviews with 12 participants in their homes explored the use of digital photos, incorporating new photo activities that are offered by new technologies. Based on the qualitative analysis of the collected data, we give an overview of current photo activities, which we term PhotoUse. We introduce a model of PhotoUse, which emphasises the purpose of photo activities rather than the tools to support them. We argue for the use of our model to design tools to support the user’s individual and social goals pertaining to PhotoUse.

PhotoGeo: a photo digital library with spatial-temporal support and self-annotation

The recent popularity of digital cameras has posed a new problem: how to efficiently store and retrieve the very large number of digital photos captured and chaotically stored in multiple locations without any annotation. This paper proposes an infrastructure, called PhotoGeo, which aims at helping users with the people photo annotation, event photo annotation, storage and retrieval of personal digital photos. To achieve the desired objective, PhotoGeo uses new algorithms that make it possible to annotate photos with the key metadata to facilitate their retrieval, such as: the people who were shown in the photo (who); where it was captured (where); the date and time of capture (when); and the event that was captured. The paper concludes with a detailed evaluation of these algorithms.

WEB-BASED PERSONAL DIGITAL PHOTO COLLECTIONS: MULTIMODAL RETRIEVAL

When personal photo collections get large retrieval of specific photos or sets of photos becomes difficult mainly due to the fairly primitive means by which they are organised. Commercial photo handling systems help but often have only elementary searching features. In this paper, we describe an interactive web-based photo retrieval system that enables personal digital photo users to accomplish photo browsing by using multimodal interaction. This system not only enables users to use mouse click input modalities but also speech input modality to browse their personal digital photos in the World Wide Web (WWW) environment. The prototype system and it architecture utilise web technology which was built using web programming scripting (JavaScript, XHTML, ASP, XML based mark-up language) and image database in order to achieve its objective. All prototype programs and data files including the user’s photo repository, profiles, dialogues, grammars, prompt, and retrieval engine are stored and located in the web server. Our approach also consists of human-computer speech dialogue based on photo browsing of image content by four main categories (Who? What? When? and Where?). Our user study with 20 digital photo users showed that the participants reacted positively to their experience with the system interactions.