SNAPshots

Project Description

The goal of automated presentation is to create compelling applications that take advantage of well-annotated photos, in order to motivate users to put in the required effort to make their digital photo collections dynamic and accessible, rather than static and unusable. We believe that photo collections that are well annotated can present a wide variety of uses and applications, and that as annotation gets easier via automation and bulk-tagging approaches, these opportunities will become increasingly realizable.

SNAPshots are Selective, Navigable, Automated Presentations that are enabled by a collection of well-annotated photos. They are selective in that they show a particular subset of the photo collection, and they are navigable in the ability dynamically change the parameters of the subset. Following are several ideas at various stages of development that highlight the possibilities of automated presentation.

Prototype: Familiar Face

Familiar Face

FamiliarFace is a prototype application designed to motivate better annotation by providing an archetype application that is enabled by existing annotations. Users are able to add family members one at a time, define relationships between them (parent, child, spouse, etc.). Once this is done, a presentation is automatically generated based on photos in the collection that contain the various people on the family tree. A "favorite" picture is highlighted, again using some kind of preferential tag during the annotation process.

Photos can be filtered further by a date range, with the subset collections updating dynamically as the dates are changed. "Queries" such as "show me pictures of Al taken in September of last year" become natural and graphical, with the results being shown as the pictures themselves, within the context of a family tree.

Further filtering can be done by generation, and users can control how many generations are visible at a given time, starting from which generation. It is thus possible to zero in on a part of the family tree that is relevant for the purposes of the particular query or application.

Other Ideas

Kaleidoscope

The Family Kaleidoscope is a prototype of an organized view of a set of photographs. It starts with a single individual in the center, and proceeds outward in concentric rectangles, each of which is related in some way to a previous level.

A control panel on the left controls which picture(s) are selected on a given level. The model assumes indication of “Favorites” within the annotations, to narrow down the choices from the complete set of photographs in the collection.

TripPics

TripPics is a prototype of an application for displaying pictures that tell a sequential story. In this case, the pictures describe a trip through Italy, with major parts of the trip set off by separate boxes.

In this screenshot, each “event” along the trip gets a single representative picture, automatically selected based on the “Favorite” tag, although the single picture could easily be replaced by the collage shown in FamiliarFace, to get a better idea of the entire collection of pictures from each part of the trip.
The pictures are shown on a white background, but they could also be superimposed on a semi-transparent map of the region traveled, with arrows or other indication of direction of travel.

Publications

Bibliography

A listing of HCIL and other photolibrary-related publications

Sponsors and Partners

Current research in this area is partially funded by Adobe Systems.

Related Sites

combinFormation - Provides a generative information space for browsing, collecting, and organizing information samples from the net.

Photo History of SIGCHI - Explore annotated photos of CHI conferences and related events from the beginning of SIGCHI through today. Find yourself and colleagues in these pictures by Ben Shneiderman and others.

Ron & Taylor's Road Trip - GPS-located images, along with TerraServer satellite imagery tiles.

Yafro Moblog - Yafro is an online community. You can create your free online picture journal (MOBLOG) using your camera phone or digital camera and share them with friends or make new friends too!

Flickr - Photo sharing and photo-based IM, with storage capabilities.

The ESP Game - Competitive photo labeling, scores for getting the same labels as other people.

See http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/photos for other photo-related projects in HCIL at Maryland.

Last update: May 23, 2004.