EECE418 Project Proposal

Team <Number TBD>: Portable Digital Photo Album

• I. Team
• II. One-line Problem Statement
• III. Description of System Being Interfaced To
• IV. Analysis of Current Interface
• V. Key Features of New Interface

I. One-Line Problem Statement

Design a standalone hand-held electronic photo organizer for home/business users, which allows for efficient retrieval, navigation, organization and archiving of digital photographs.

II. Team

III. Description of System Being Interfaced To

The photo organizer device will serve as the central hub for a person or family’s photo organizing needs.  Our proposed device will interface with:

• Digital Cameras ?for direct download via Bluetooth, Firewire, or USB.
• Digital Storage Cards ?a built in card reader will accept various formats for reading and writing
• Wireless Internet Router ?for network access to facilitate remote sharing and upload to photo developers
• Photo Printers ?for creating prints at home
• PC ?for upload to web servers for online photo hosting

IV. Analysis of Current Interface

1. Functionality

The proliferation of digital photography in recent years, coupled with the low costs associated with its use, has created an explosion in the number of digital photographs in a typical user’s archive.  Digital photos are stored on the computer as individual image files (e.g. .jpg, .bmp), but due to the limitations of file system, the available organization schemes have been limited mostly to the familiar folder hierarchy. To examine the performance of current photo organization software, we will examine two of the most popular photo organization packages: Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 and ACDSee 6.0.

There are many similarities between the functionality of the programs. They each have a presentation region for displaying images. A side panel is used for searching or simple photo editing. The user interfaces behave like most other applications under Windows in terms of menu nomenclature and organization.

A key development that PhotoAlbum have made on top of the conventional folder organization is a sliding timeline. Users can slide the bar along to search for photos based on the time they were taken (Figure 2); a calendar view is also available in both programs to specify the query, allowing the user to view photos by day, month, or year. The fundamental organization of the photos still relies on folder hierarchy. Most of the photo organizers require users to specify a photo repository to group photos. Inside the repository, the programs utilize tags and a database to store metadata and user comments for future queries and search.

2. Stakeholders

• Any home users with an interest in viewing, taking, processing and sharing digital photographs
• Business users
• Photographers
• Children and elderly users

3. Requirements

• Users can view and organize photographs taken with a digital camera
• Users can navigate through the photo collection in a manner similar to flipping through pages on a traditional printed photo album
• Users can specify the granularity at which the photos will be presented (by year, month, week, day, time range within a day)
• The software shall automatically group photos based on time at which they were taken and offer simple album creation functionality for a large independent cluster (e.g. photos from a day trip)
• An intuitive interface so that children and elderly users can easily navigate and browse for photos

4. Describe current problems with interface.

A number of research projects have examined the usage habits and photo organization methods employed by digital camera owners.  Here is a summary of the work:

• People rarely take the time to organize their photos after download [1]
• People prefer to have a printed copy of their digital photos because printed photos better support spontaneous desires for viewing.
• Though digital photos are ideal for sharing with distant friends and family, it is found to be unnatural to view a digital photo album together in front of a monitor.
• Photos taken of events tend to cluster together temporally and as a result, specific photos are searched by the users based on a rough chronological memory of the desired shot [2]
• Studied participants were able to retrieve desired photos simply by a rough memory of the relative chronological relationships of events when browsing [3].
• A fresh batch of photos from a camera download will have many technically flawed pictures interlaced with the good ones. The low cost of digital photography encourages people to take more risks experimenting with creative shots.

Armed with this knowledge, we can see that current photo organization software and in fact, the current practice of viewing and sharing photos from the PC platform suffers from the following problems.

1)    Unnatural browsing mechanism: In the case of traditional photo albums, people can paste the photos anywhere as they like. The spatial arrangement of the photos is not constrained. In the case of software, photos are almost always arranged neatly in rows and columns (as in thumbnails view) or occupy the whole screen (as in preview view). The lack of flexibility might make people feel unemotional. Furthermore, people would much prefer to sit on a sofa with an album in lap than to sit in front of a PC viewing photos on a monitor.

2)    Complicated tagging schemes: Given most users simply download their photos and perform little in the way of categorizing, the assumption of photo organizing software that users will enter metadata descriptions of photos for later retrieval is misplaced. 

3)    Inflexible temporal navigation: Current photo album applications, even for the ones providing a slide bar to browse the photos temporally, do not have an intuitive and easy way to change the temporal granularity for rapid browsing (e.g. zooming in from year to months, to days, etc).  This is important because studies have found users prefer to locate pictures by zeroing in on the time and date of the photo.  Providing a method that mirrors this process and allows the user to zero-in on the time should be supported.

V. Key Features of New Interface

1. New / altered functions

From examining these findings, we feel there is a strong need for a dedicated digital photo album in the home.  Even the most advanced photo organization software today still resides on the PC, making the process of sharing memories from a photo album very awkward, with everyone clustered around a monitor.  Email and MP3 both started out on the PC while their eventual usage patterns were still in a formative stage, but they eventually moved onto dedicated devices as people saw the value of checking their email on a Blackberry and listening a tune on their iPod.  Our photo viewer is intended to follow a similar evolutionary path.

Besides the tablet form factor, we are also proposing the following functionality in our dedicated photo viewer:

• A temporally clustered view of photos that can be adjusted for granularity (e.g. viewing photos as a cluster by month, day, hour, minutes, etc)
• One-touch photo tagging to facilitate the separation of good photos from the technically flawed ones
• Simple creation of photo albums from a pool of photos

A software mock-up of the photo organizer will be created on the PC to demonstrate the interface.  Instead of a touch-screen LCD, a regular PC monitor and mouse will be used to simulate a user interacting with the tablet. 

2. Cost Estimate

We estimate that the implementation of the entire project according to the vision we have outlined above will require the breakdown to the following:

• Physical interface hardware research and construction (9600 man hrs)
• Photo Navigation Module(1600 man hrs)
• Remote network component (300 man hrs)

~End of Proposal~