Archive for September, 2009
Photo management is an open problem
Today, we stumbled across this post by Prof Ramesh Jain and were amazed at how similar these thoughts are to what we are working on.
A quick peek at the most popular photo management solutions today will tell you that it is still all about uploading your photos, organizing into albums and creating a slideshow. Flickr, to some extent lets you discover related stuff through tags, but thats pretty much it.
To us, photo management is not just about organization of photos but about discovery, photos connecting with each other and helping users navigate through the mesh of related photos. Add to this the time context around a photo and it has all the ingredients of a heady cocktail that could have you hooked for hours.
Imagine taking a shot of “The Statue of Liberty” and instantly finding other people who also shot it around the same time. Or imagine going on a trek with your friends and getting a view of what your friends did while you were at the trek. Imagine attending a pink floyd concert and discovering shots taken by fans at several other previous concerts of pink floyd.
The possibilities are endless and there is a huge problem to be solved here. We are trying to crack some of these problems at http://www.lifeblob.com by making it really easy for you to add and organize your photos in a time based manner. We have also built a system that tracks connections of each photo and highlights connections that are more important to you than others.
We are in the process of turning on some discovery options like the examples that I gave above and hopefully you will be able to take a test ride of this before the end of this month.
If you also think that photo management is an unsolved problem, we would love to hear from you!
