SMILINGPHO

TOS

Bridging the Gap between Digital Photo Albums and Printed Photo Books

Ombretta Gaggi and Fabrizio Ghidoni

Department of Pure and Applied Mathematics, University of Padua, via Trieste, 63, 35121 Padua, Italy

Keywords:

Photo book authoring, Photo sharing services, Multimedia synchronization, SMIL, Web 2.0.

Abstract:

The number of photos has signiﬁcantly increased in the recent years together with the problem of how to

manage them: a picture can be printed as is, arranged into a more interesting photo book or shared through

the web. Digital photos have the advantage that can be easily stored and shared with family and friends

from different cities or countries but we must consider that many people do not even see the PC screen as

a convenient vehicle for synchronously reviewing and sharing of photos with others. This paper presents a

framework to bridge the gap between digital web albums and printed photo books. The idea is to allow the

user to create, at the same time, a photo book for later printing, and a multimedia presentation to share with

friends not only the taken pictures but the experiences they told. The paper presents smilingPhotos a tool for

this double authoring: the user creates a multimedia slideshow which can be enriched with audio (music or

spoken) comments, transition effects, animations and deﬁnition of the layout of the images. The result can be

shared across the network, or automatically translated into a static photo book suitable for printing.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays most people have a digital camera in their

homes. This have brought to a signiﬁcant increase in

the number of pictures taken in recent years. How-

ever, the huge number of photos carries the problem

of how to manage them: a picture can be printed as is,

arranged into a more interesting photo book or shared

through the web.

Even if the authoring of a photo book is still a

complex and time consuming activities, the arrange-

ment of favorite photos into albums is considered

the best way to archive them (Frohlich et al., 2002;

Frohlich et al., 2008). As an example, CeWe Color

produced about 2.6 million photo books in 2008 and

this production has increased of 57.8 % in the ﬁrst ﬁve

months of 2009 (CeWe Color Holding AG, 2009).

Digital photos have the advantage that can be eas-

ily stored and shared with family and friends from

different cities or countries but we must consider that

many people do not even see the PC screen as a con-

venient vehicle for synchronously reviewing and shar-

ing of photos with others. Some studies (Frohlich

et al., 2002; Frohlich et al., 2008) reported that some

people do not have fun when looking at a picture in

a screen but they want to point to things and com-

pare different pictures. For this reason digital pho-

tography has not completely replaced conventional

photography: people usually prefer printed photos to

archive most precious memories (birthdays, gradua-

tions, weddings, etc) while they must use web tech-

nologies as a vehicle for duplicating and distributing

those memories to families and friends.

This paper presents a framework to bridge the gap

between digital web albums and printed photo books.

The idea is to allow the user to create, at the same

time, a photo book for later printing, and a multimedia

presentation to share with friends not only the taken

pictures but the experiences they told. We implement

a tool for this double authoring: the user creates a

multimedia slideshow which can be enriched with au-

dio (music or spoken) comments, transition effects,

animations and deﬁnition of the layout of the images.

The result can be shared across the network, or auto-

matically translated into a static photo book suitable

for printing. The multimedia presentation can take

pictures from web albums shared in community like

Google Picasa Web Album or Yahoo! Flickr.

The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 dis-

cusses the background and the related work. Section

3 presents smilingPhotos a tool which allows to cre-

ate printed photo books and enriched multimedia pre-

113

Gaggi O. and Ghidoni F.

SMILINGPHOTOS - Bridging the Gap between Digital Photo Albums and Printed Photo Books.

DOI: 10.5220/0002808901130118

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technology (WEBIST 2010), page

ISBN: 978-989-674-025-2

sentations at the same time with just about the same

effort of authoring a photo book for printing. A user

study for the evaluation of the implemented tool is de-

scribed in Section 4. We conclude in Section 5.

2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED

WORK

Other works in literature consider the problem of au-

thoring photo books. Sandhaus et al describe the pro-

cess of photo book production as a complex activity

divided in three phases: the capture phase, the author

phase and print phase (Sandhaus et al., 2008). The au-

thors identify the second phase as the most time con-

suming and annoying activity, hence applications that

support the photo book author are needed. This prob-

lem has been deeply investigated in recent years. A

partial solution is “Many for one” (Boll et al., 2007),

a tool that allows the semi-automatic creation of photo

books which pictures can be taken from the user com-

puter or from other sources. The tool automatically

arranges the photos into templates for printing. More-

over it enriches the photo book by inserting interest-

ing related information (e.g. a text or pictures from

a travel guide) from content of others, e.g. from web

communities.

The experience of the user sharing photos through

web communities has been studied in (Cunningham

and Masoodian, 2007) and (Frohlich and Fennel,

2007). They both highlight that interacting with a web

album must be more appealing to be really enjoyable

for users. Despite Frohlich and Fennell agree with the

rule “less is more”, since it is important to keep the in-

terface simple to be usable, they suggest the possibil-

ity of including audio commentary as one of the key

functionalities to be implemented to improve the shar-

ing between users of experiences depicted in the pho-

tos. The idea is to create a virtual scenario in which a

user shows some pictures to his/her friends and gives

comments on them. This can be simulated by adding

a synchronized spoken comment to a set of images.

Storytelling is another means of conveying per-

sonal experiences through digital photographs which

shares the same scenario described above. In (Landry,

2008) the author notes that while new cameras have

simpliﬁed the activity of capturing, producing com-

pelling presentations using digital photos and other

media is not less difﬁcult due to current technologies,

and argues the introduction of tenets of storytelling

into software for common photo activities. He imple-

ments Storytellr, a system that integrates tasks of the

storytelling process with photo activities like annota-

tion and arrangements.

PhotoArcs (Ames and Manguy, 2006) is another

system for storytelling which allows to add narratives

to web photo albums. The photos are organized into

linear arcs connected by text information. Different

narratives may intersect creating multiple versions of

a particular story. Even if the result is particularly

appealing for the end users, it requires a relevant au-

thoring activity.

Some works cope with the problem of non-

existing connection between printed photos and their

digital counterpart. Among these, (Henze and Boll,

2008) presents a system that uses a mobile’s phone

camera to take a picture of a printed photo in a photo

book. This image is sent to a server which is able

to retrieve the corresponding photo and send it to the

user. In order to recognize the correct photo, the au-

thors developed image analysis techniques which are

robust against scale, rotation and partial occlusion.

They used an approach based on SIFT (Scale Invari-

ant Feature Transform) algorithm which is also able to

retrieve images captured with different lighting con-

ditions. (Jin et al., 2004) describes a gesture-based

interaction photo album (GIA) device that provides

a natural interface since it simulates the turning of

pages as in a printed photo book. GIA enhances the

user experiences since it allows transitions and anima-

tions between pictures, and to interact with the photos

(e. g. zoom in or out) through hand gestures. How-

ever the distribution of albums is restricted to the own-

ership of this device.

3 SMILINGPHOTOS: ENHANCED

PHOTO BOOKS WITH SMIL

TEMPLATES

Let us consider a scenario in which a group of friends

gets together and shares some printed photos (usually

organized into a photo book) and has fun discussing

on it. Unfortunately printed photo book cannot be

shared and distributed across the network therefore,

later on, the photos are uploaded into a web album to

be visible to friends that lived in other cities. However

this second kind of users live a very different experi-

ence since they lack a set of important auxiliary infor-

mation to understand the pictures: how the photo are

collected usually respects their temporal and spatial

relationships, and the spoken comment, which is very

important, is completely missing.

A solution can be the creation of a slideshow of

images synchronized with an audio comment, but

since the users consider the authoring of a photo book

a complex and time consuming activity they are un-

WEBIST 2010 - 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

114

likely to make the effort to create also this kind of

multimedia presentation as a completely separated

job, using a different authoring tool requiring differ-

ent skills, even if the result is a very involving experi-

ences for remote users. On the other hand, presently,

there is no way to author, at the same time with the

same effort, a photo book and something else suitable

for an efﬁcient photos sharing.

Our work aims to partially solve this problem with

smilingPhotos: the digital web albums are really poor

in term of user experience, they usually allow only

to view one photo at time and comment it with text.

Moreover, our tool tries to ﬁnd a solution to the lack of

any connection between printed photos and its digital

counterparts by combining the quite simple interface

common to photo book authoring systems with the

powerful of SMIL (Bulterman et al, 2008), a standard

language developed by W3C to describe temporal and

spatial speciﬁcation a multimedia presentation.

3.1 The Prototype Implementation

smilingPhotos is a prototype authoring system which

helps the simultaneous creation of printed photo

books and rich multimedia presentations to improve

photos sharing experience. We must note here that

we do not aim at creating a complete authoring tool

for photo books, since this kind of tool is very com-

plex and requires a great number of features which are

out of the scope of this work, but our goal is the im-

plementation of a prototype which provides both the

functions described above. However in order to keep

the authoring activity simple, smilingPhotos does not

require the knowledge of SMIL language, but imports

a set of SMIL templates that are ﬁlled by user with

drag and drop operations. Expert users may create

new SMIL template or modify the existing ones.

smilingPhotos was implemented with the Java lan-

guage and uses the XML language to save the user

preferences and initial conﬁgurations. Figure 1 shows

the user interface. The user can import pictures from

the hard disk of her/his computer or from web com-

munities. In particular the prototype system allows to

import photos from Google Picasa Web Albums. In

the same way, the ﬁnal multimedia presentation can

link photos from any web server or from Picasa Web

Albums. The integration with other web communi-

ties are planned for the future. The imported photos

are displayed on the left side of the user interface, the

area marked by the letter “a” in Figure 1.

The user can choose the initial number of pages

when she/he creates a new book. Initially all the pages

share the same layout and are shown in the storyboard

bar in the bottom (area marked by letter “c” in Figure

1). Then, the user can choose a page layout from the

card with the label “Layout” ( marked by “d” in Fig-

ure 1). The user changes the layout templates by drag

a layout and drop it over the page in the storyboard.

These template are written in SMIL and describe

not only the spatial layout but also the temporal syn-

chronization. The author disposes the pictures in the

template by dragging and dropping them from the

pictures preview panel: the result is shown in the

right rectangular area of the user interface (marked

by letter “b” in Figure 1). When the user saves the

project, smilingPhotos creates a presentation in which

photos are spatially arranged according to the chosen

template for each page. The ﬁnal user can navigate

through pages by clicking on the right and left arrows,

one to go to the next page, and one to go back to the

previous page. These images are automatically cre-

ated by the tool on the lower right and left corners.

The “Preview” button stars the presentation.

The user can modify the temporal synchroniza-

tion only by adding a duration to pages. This means

that each page, in absence of user interactions, is dis-

played on the user screen for a predeﬁned time inter-

val. Then, the next page is played. This choice is due

with the purpose to keep the authoring activity sim-

ple: the photo book must be done without requiring

any particular knowledge to the user. Modiﬁcations

to the time line of the multimedia presentation can

be done by expert user who can manually modify the

SMIL templates or add new ones.

These simple steps, importing the photos, choos-

ing templates and ﬁlling them with drag and drop op-

erations, are similar to many other photo book author-

ing tools and produce as output a photo book suitable

for printing. Many tools for photo book authoring use

XML templates. The choice of SMIL templates in-

stead of other solutions, brings the side-effects that

the produced result contains also some timing rela-

tionships, transition effects and animations deﬁned in

the templates. Let us consider the case in which the

same spatial layout is used both to print a page and

to display images into a multimedia presentation by

moving them in the screen, one at a time, till they

reach the desired position. We can say that, in same

sense, the author designs the photo book for printing,

and gets back also the multimedia presentation. This

double result helps to pay the user back for the com-

plexity of the authoring activity: hence smilingPhotos

try to solve one of the key problem of photo books

production discussed in the introduction.

Let us consider, as an example, a photo book like

the one depicted in Figure 1. The book is limited to

6 pages, but the author can add new pages by click-

ing the right button mouse on the bar at the bottom.

SMILINGPHOTOS - Bridging the Gap between Digital Photo Albums and Printed Photo Books

115

Figure 1: User interface of the prototype smilingPhotos. The “Layout” panel (d) is hidden under the pictures preview panel.

If the user saves the book, smilingPhotos creates two

ﬁles: a SMIL ﬁle describing the resulting multimedia

presentation and an XML ﬁle describing the structure

of the document without the temporal information.

This second ﬁle is used to re-open the book for fur-

ther elaboration, e. g., to print it. We must say that a

standard format for printing does not exist, but each

photo printing service deﬁnes its own format, usually

using XML language. For this reason, smilingPho-

tos does not export a particular format, but the use of

XML languages (SMIL is an XML language too) al-

lows for the easy translation to any existing format by

deﬁning an appropriate XSLT transformation.

At this stage, the resulting presentation is simi-

lar to what can be obtained with applications pro-

vided by many printing service, which allow to review

on-line the photo book before printing: the pictures

are arranged in spatial template and the user can ﬂip

through the book pages. The use of SMIL allows to

add animations and translation to pages. As an exam-

ple, pictures can enter from outside the screen and the

ﬂip through the pages can be associated to transitions

like fade, or something more complicated like clok-

wise or barwise transitions. Moreover, the user may

enlarge a picture by clicking on it. All these behav-

iors are achieved without user intervention, she/he has

only to choose a template: in the layout panel, layouts

which contain transitions or animations are marked,

respectively, by a star or a triangle (see Figure 1(d)).

SmilingPhotos requires two additional steps to en-

rich the ﬁnal multimedia presentation: the author can

• add a duration to each page, deﬁned in seconds

by clicking the right button mouse over the page

on the storyboard, so that the ﬁnal user can watch

a presentation that automatically ﬂips the pages

after a predeﬁned time interval and

• add an audio comment synchronized to the entire

presentation, e. g. a music jingle, or to each single

page, e. g. a voice that comments each picture dis-

played in that page to virtually re-create the situa-

tion in which a set of co-located friends listens to

the picture owner who comments the photo book.

Once the authoring activity is ﬁnished and the au-

thor decides to save the enhanced photo book, the tool

ﬁlls all the templates with the references to actual me-

dia items and collects them into a single SMIL ﬁle.

Then, the photo book can be translated into a propri-

etary format to be sent to a printing service, or the

author can share the multimedia presentation through

the web. In this case, it is sufﬁcient to upload the

SMIL document and the audio ﬁles (when needed) to

a web site. The photos must be uploaded only if they

are not already shared into a Picasa Web Album.

The SMIL document needs a suitable player for

rendering. Our tool uses the third version of the stan-

dard, the last one deﬁned, therefore, at the moment,

the only available player is Ambulant Player (Ambu-

lant Open SMIL Player, 2009). This player is avail-

able freeware for all operating systems as a stand

alone application, or as a plug-in for the Mozilla Fire-

Fox and Apple Safari web browsers. Therefore at the

moment, the multimedia presentation can be played

as a stand alone application with Ambulant player in

any operating system, but is accessible on the web

only with FireFox and Safari. This limitation is due

to the availably of the Ambulant plug-in for these

browsers. We think that future implementations of the

standard will overcome this limitation. To the best of

our knowledge, other browsers (e. g. Microsoft Inter-

net Explorer) currently support some modules of the

standard and plan to extend this support to a bigger

subset of SMIL tags and attributes. Moreover, there

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are JavaScript implementations of some SMIL mod-

ules (e. g. JavaScript implementation of smilText is

available in the web page of the Ambulant Player)

which make documents, using that modules, acces-

sible with any browser.

4 USER STUDY

The prototype implementation of smilingPhotos has

been tested also with a user study in which a set of 10

users, from 20 to 40 years old, evaluate the tool and

give feedbacks. The user study allows us to evaluate

the tool, but also its suitability to the target audience

and the possible impact on the users’ choice among

different printing services and web communities for

photo sharing. The goal was to assess the interest

of potential users in adding sound comments, anima-

tions and transitions to standard photo books and the

degree of user-friendliness of the system.

The users were asked to create a photobook with

the tool and to answer to a questionnaire of 15 ques-

tions. The questions consist on multiple choice ques-

tions on the user degree of expertise in using applica-

tions for photo book editing and photo sharing, their

interest in the ﬁnal presentation and the quality of the

experience made with smilingPhotos. The users rate

the answers on a scale from 0 to 5. At the end they

have the possibility to express additional remarks.

The majority of users declare they had used at

least once a program for authoring photo books (60%)

but their degree of expertise is rather low (on aver-

age, 1.4). Almost all the participants (90%) have used

an application for photo sharing on the web, they de-

clared to use it quite frequently and their degree of

expertise is high.

Before starting the evaluation, the aims of the tool,

how it works, and the goal of the user study are ex-

plained to the participants. For this test, the users run

smilingPhotos in a notebook in which they could ﬁnd

also a folder with pictures, music and audio effects

which they could select for the creation of the photo

book. During all the authoring activity, the user could

refer to a text guide if they needed it. The user could

also play two multimedia presentations, both created

with smilingPhotos, an example, and an enriched user

guide. The second one, a photo book in which each

page shows a different functionality of the tool with

screen shots and audio comments, had both the goal

to help the user in his/her activity, and to show a pos-

sible output of the software they were testing.

The questionnaires revealed the following in-

sights. The interest of users in the possibility to

add animations, transition effects and music to their

Figure 2: Answer to question 3, 4 and 5 of the question-

naire.

shared photos is, on average, high (mean 3.5, stan-

dard deviation 0.97). In Figure 2, the answer to this

question are labeled by “Q3”. The users declared

also an higher interest (mean 4, most frequent value

5) in the possibility to have an enriched multimedia

slideshow as a digital counterpart to the printed photo

book: only two participant declared an interest lower

than 4 (see Figure 2, series “Q4”). In the same way,

they declare an even higher interest in the possibil-

ity to obtain both the photo book for printing and the

enriched slideshow for web sharing with the same ap-

plication (mean 3.9, most frequent value 5) as shown

by series “Q5” in the ﬁgure.

Figure 3: Answer to question 6, 7 and 8 of the question-

naire.

The user reported a good experience in using smil-

ingPhotos rated, on average, to 3 (series “Q6” in Fig-

ure 3). The quality of the ﬁnal output, i. e., both the

photo book for printing and the multimedia presenta-

tion, is also good (mean 3.2, most frequent value 4):

only three participants evaluate it less than 3 as re-

ported in Figure 3 by series “Q7”. Users have highly

evaluated the relationship between the quality of the

result and the effort to get it (mean 4, standard de-

viation 0.4, complete distribution depicted by series

“Q8”). Some users reported in the additional remarks

that they highly appreciated the simplicity of the tool:

they experienced other softwares that are able to give

better output, but the effort to understand how they

work had prevented them from using.

Finally, the user study highlighted that the avail-

ably of tool like smilingPhotos can inﬂuence the user

choice among printing service and web sharing ap-

plications. The participants to the study stated that

this inﬂuence is considerable and is higher for print-

ing services (mean 3.4) than for web sharing applica-

SMILINGPHOTOS - Bridging the Gap between Digital Photo Albums and Printed Photo Books

117

tions (mean 2.8).

5 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper we presented smilingPhoto, a proto-

type authoring tool for the creation of enhanced photo

books, i. e. photo books suitable both for printing,

to archive most precious memories, and for sharing

photos (and experiences) through the web. The goal

is to enhance the experiences of remote users, without

asking too much additional effort in the authoring ac-

tivity. smilingPhoto allows to choose a page template

and ﬁll it with drag and drop operations. Moreover,

it can add music or spoken comment to a single page

or to the whole photo book. Picture can be imported

from web communities, like Google Picasa.

Beside the printed photo book, smilingPhoto pro-

duces as output also a multimedia presentation, de-

scribed using SMIL, which can be uploaded to a web

server. In this way, our tool tries to ﬁll the gap be-

tween a printed photo and its digital counterpart.

A user study has been conducted to test and eval-

uate the system: it shows that the participants are

highly interested in the possibility to obtain also a

multimedia presentation as result of the creation of

a photo book for printing. Moreover, they really ap-

preciate the ratio between the quality of the obtained

output and the effort required to get it.

Many other authoring system for printed photo

book have been implemented in recent years, but they

usually focus only on printing and do not allow to

share the books or the quality of their digital counter-

part is very poor (e. g. they do not allow transitions

or animations, and the user interaction is limited to

the ﬂip of pages.). Apple iPhoto (Apple Inc., 2009)

requires some discussion. It is an authoring system,

available only for Apple platform, which allows the

creation of photo book which can also be shared. As

the majority of photo book authoring systems it is

based on layout templates, but it is possible to add

music and some templates contain transition effects.

Differently from our approach, the digital albums can-

not be shared in web pages

but only through iPhone

or iPod. smilingPhoto does not impose any platform,

operating system or device, and the use of the stan-

dard SMIL opens the possibility, in the future, to play

the presentation in all browsers. Finally, some par-

ticipants to the user study declared that, even if smil-

ingPhoto is not comparable to iPhoto in term of im-

plemented functionalities, they prefer our tool for its

Single images or gallery can be shared through web

pages

simplicity of use, since the learning time needed for

iPhoto is considerably too high.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank the participants to the

user case and Silvia Crafa for her support and helpful

discussion.

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