Tool: MGI PhotoSuite II
Data: HCIL Digital Photo Library
Goals: Input, Edit, Catalog, Search, Browse, and Export Digital Photos
Introduction and Motivation
Personal use of digital cameras continues to grow as the necessary hardware and software becomes more mainstream and
inexpensive. The ability to store photos as digital files rather than paper copies allows people to modify, organize, and share
photos in new and exciting ways. A variety of commercial software packages and online services are available to help users
with these tasks. However, the questions of how useable these tools are and how well they scale to managing large numbers of
photos are open research issues. The University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) is currently
exploring these questions in their Personal Photo Library project. As part of this project, team members are evaluating some of the available commercial digital photo management software.
This web page presents a description and evaluation of one such product,
PhotoSuite II. Constructing a detailed visualization of a large set of photos with this product turns out to be difficult, so we instead discuss some of the shortcomings of the product and suggest some potential improvements.
Tool Overview
PhotoSuite is a commercial software package that claims to be
"The Complete PC Photography & Internet Experience" for home and business use. It allows users to capture
and edit photos from different sources, create a variety of presentations, and share them via email, web pages,
and traditional file saving and printing. It is more powerful than many other commercial packages (e.g. Adobe PhotoDeluxe
and ixla Digital Camera Suite) because it allows users to search and annotate photos with metadata across a number of indexical facets (e.g. category, place, camera lens).
For editing and organizing small sets of photos (less than 50) with few annotations, PhotoSuite is a
fine tool. Its most interesting and useful features are found in the Album and
Slide Show tools. However, for larger quantities of photos, it lacks sufficient tools for overview
visualization, bulk annotation, and complex searches.
Tool Features
The following is a summary of the features provided by PhotoSuite:
Photo Capture
- File
- Digital Camera
- Scanner
- Online Photo Service
Photo Projects
- Collages
- Posters
- Cards
- Calendars
- Backgrounds
- Labels
- Business Cards
- Name Tags
- Certificates
- Albums*
- Slide Shows*
Guides
- Step-by-Step Project Instruction
|
Photo Editing
- Draw/Paint
- Zoom/Pan
- Rotate/Crop
- Touch Up
- Remove Red Eye
- Special Effects
Photo Export
- Save
- Print
- Email
- Create Web Page
- Create Wallpaper
- Upload to Online Service
Internet Tools
- Instructional Site
- Photo-Related Sites
- Links to Online Photo Services
- Updates
|
Photo Album Tool
Using the Album tool, users can load photos from any of the supported sources into the main window
of the application as thumbnails. With the smallest thumbnail size selected, 77 thumbnails can be
viewed in the window on a 19" monitor. The photos are locked into
the grid organization, but can be reordered by dragging and dropping them in new locations in the grid.
Each photo in the album can be individually annotated with up to 21
pre-defined categorical and camera-related indexical facets. These facets,
called properties, include title, place, people in photo, camera
lens, and shutter speed. Notably absent are temporal properties such as date, user-defined properties,
and the ability to annotate multiple photos at once.
Once photos have been annotated, users can search the photos in the
album based on a value for a single property, including file name and file date. Search is case-insensitive,
and substring searches are allowed, but wildcard searches are not. The entire set of photos in the album is searched- no subgoup searches are supported.
Users can also sort the photos in ascending or
descending order according to the same single property criteria-
only one property can be used for the sort. However, sorting a subgroup of
photos found from a search is allowed. When the photos are annotated
and sorted as desired, users can save the album in a variety of formats for sharing and display, most usefully
as a web page.
Slide Show Tool
Using the Slide Show tool, users can create and present digital slide shows with their photos.
Photos can be added only from files or from a hideable, scrollable window on the right side of the screen that
displays photos loaded while in other modes. Photos in the show appear as thumbnails
along the bottom of the screen, enclosed in slide-casings. The thumbnails can be reordered by
dragging and dropping, and the currently selected thumbnail appears full size in the main window. In between
each thumbnail is an icon representing the transition between the previous slide and the next slide.
Each transition can be set to a different type, such as wiping the previous slide away with the new one or pushing it to the side.
The transitions are set by dragging a type icon from a window of choices on the right side of the screen onto the transition icon.
Users can set global properties for the slide show for display size and
background color, slide and transition durations, and attached sound files. Users can also set
individual slide properties for duration and sound.
Using VCR-like buttons under the thumbnails, users can play the slide show at various speeds forward and backward in the window or a full screen size.
Users can also save the slide show as a series of web pages that others
can then view by paging through.
Tool Evaluation
PhotoSuite is a useful collection of tools for home users who want to organize small numbers of photos in simple ways.
However, the only really useful tool for organizing large groups of photos
is the Album tool, and it does not scale very well.
In the Album tool, the thumbnails are
locked into a fixed grid and cannot be separated into subgroups by the user, a common task when sorting paper
photos. Without this feature, it is difficult to casually browse through a collection of photos of any significant size. Browsing is also hindered by the loss of global context when a single photo is selected to be viewed at full size in the main window, covering up the thumbnails.
The lack of a grouping feature also makes it impossible
to sort or search subgroups of photos. Searching and sorting is limited
to single, predefined properties on the full set of photos, and
there is no way to do conjunctive or disjunctive searches on multiple properties.
Annotating photos with just the few pre-defined properties is still
extremely cumbersome, even with just a few photos.
Only a single
property of a single photo can be annotated at a time. There is no way to add user-defined properties, annotate multiple
photos with the same property, or set multiple properties for the same photo
in a single step.
The photo editing and slide show tools in PhotoSuite II are comparable to
other commercial software, and the photo importing and exporting tools are
fairly powerful. However,
without more flexible metadata capabilities, the ability to operate on
subgroups of photos, and more robust annotation features, PhotoSuite II lacks the
features required for cataloging, searching, and browsing large groups of photos.
Suggested Improvements
In addition to solving the problems mentioned above in the "Tool Evaluation" section, there are a number of other ways that
PhotoSuite II could be improved. Kuchinsky et.al. describe a prototype system called FotoFile for multimedia organization and
retrieval. Through informal user studies, they found that users did not want to spend a lot of time organizing their
photos with keyboard annotations, and that they wanted to browse through photos, not just perform direct search activities. To address the
first concern, they added a facial feature extraction tool to recognize faces in photos. This tool allows users to assign a name to a face,
and then automatically annotates new photos when the same face is recognized, freeing users from having to do this annotation themselves.
To address the second concern, they added the ability to visualize photos with a hyperbolic tree built from the values of various
indexical facets applied to a set of photos. They also noted that people like to tell stories with photos and allowed users to create
small groups of photos called scraplets to represent single narrative episodes.
In the HCIL Personal Photo Library project, team members are beginning to experiment with other useful features. They are
developing a drag and drop annotation system, which allows users to annotate
by dragging properties onto various parts of photos.
Like the face recognition tool, this feature frees the user from more time-consuming keyboard annotations. To support browsing and
grouping of photos, they are developing a thumbnail browser where individual photos and subgroups of photos from a large set can
be moved around, annotated, and zoomed. They are also working on
multi-tiered visualization of photo libraries with Snap-Together Visualization. Various views of a set of photos are snapped together to
provide an overview -- zoom and filter -- details on demand functionality.
Finally, there are a number of other projects just within the HCIL that might
be applicable to photo library tools such as PhotoSuite II.
The Jazz software would enable users to visualize very large sets of photos by zooming in and out. Organizing paper photos
is often a project that two or more people do together. The KidPad software supports multiple input devices and might be applicable to
group presentation building with digital photos. Kuchinsky's observation that people like to tell stories with photos and pictures is
especially true for children, a discovery also made in the PETS project in the HCIL. The storytelling software in PETS could be used to
incorporate activities for children into a photo software package.
References
Kuchinsky, Allan, et. al. "FotoFile: A Consumer Multimedia Organization and Retrieval System". CHI 99 Proceedings, pages
496-503.
Copyright © 1999 Hilary Browne hbrowne@cs.umd.edu