This Article is Not…
about deconstructing existing functionality of entire Photo Archive and Sharing platforms.
It is…
to bring an awareness to the masses about corporate decisions to omit the advanced capabilities of cataloguing photos, object recognition, and advanced metadata tagging.
Backstory: The Asks / Needs
Every day my family takes tons of pictures, and the pictures are bulk loaded up to The Cloud using Cloud Storage Services, such as DropBox, OneDrive, Google Photos, or iCloud. A selected set of photos are uploaded to our favourite Social Networking platform (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and/or Twitter).
Every so often, I will take pause, and create either a Photobook or print out pictures from the last several months. The kids may have a project for school to print out e.g. Family Portrait or just a picture of Mom and the kids. In order to find these photos, I have to manually go through our collection of photographs from our Cloud Storage Services, or identify the photos from our Social Network libraries.
Social Networking Platform Facebook
As far as I can remember the Social Networking platform Facebook has had the ability to tag faces in photos uploaded to the platform. There are restrictions, such as whom you can tag from the privacy side, but the capability still exists. The Facebook platform also automatically identifies faces within photos, i.e. places a box around faces in a photo to make the person tagging capability easier. So, in essence, there is an “intelligent capability” to identify faces in a photo. It seems like the Facebook platform allows you to see “Photos of You”, but what seems to be missing is to search for all photos of Fred Smith, a friend of yours, even if all his photos are public. By design, it sounds fit for the purpose of the networking platform.
Auto Curation
- Automatically upload new images in bulk or one at a time to a Cloud Storage Service ( with or without Online Printing Capabilities, e.g. Photobooks) and an automated curation process begins.
- The Auto Curation process scans photos for:
- “Commonly Identifiable Objects”, such as #Car, #Clock, #Fireworks, and #People
- Auto Curation of new photos, based on previously tagged objects and faces in newly uploaded photos will be automatically tagged.
- Once auto curation runs several times, and people are manually #taged, the auto curation process will “Learn” faces. Any new auto curation process executed should be able to recognize tagged people in new pictures.
- Auto Curation process emails / notifies the library owners of the ingestion process results, e.g. Jane Doe and John Smith photographed at Disney World on Date / Time stamp. i.e. Report of executed ingestion, and auto curation process.
Manual Curation
After upload, and auto curation process, optionally, it’s time to manually tag people’s faces, and any ‘objects’ which you would like to track, e.g. Car aficionado, #tag vehicle make/model with additional descriptive tags. Using the photo curator function on the Cloud Storage Service can tag any “objects” in the photo using Rectangle or Lasso Select.
Curation to Take Action
Once photo libraries are curated, the library owner(s) can:
- Automatically build albums based one or more #tags
- Smart Albums automatically update, e.g. after ingestion and Auto Curation. Albums are tag sensitive and update with new pics that contain certain people or objects. The user/ librarian may dictate logic for tags.
Where is this Functionality??
Why are may major companies not implementing facial (and object) recognition? Google and Microsoft seem to have the capability/size of the company to be able to produce the technology.
Is it possible Google and Microsoft are subject to more scrutiny than a Shutterfly? Do privacy concerns at the moment, leave others to become trailblazers in this area?