Enhancing Photoware in the Social Networks Environment

Ombretta Gaggi

Dept. of Mathematics, University of Padua, via Trieste, 63, 35121 Padua, Italy

Keywords:

Digital Photo Management, Social Network.

Abstract:

This paper presents SMIL PhotoShow, an authoring tool for photo books, which allows the creation of en-

hanced multimedia presentations, enriched with audio (music or spoken) comments, transition effects and

animations in a very simple way. Our tool allows to create a digital counterpart of a printed photo book with

the aim to bridge the gap between digital web albums and printed photo books. Since authoring a photo book

is a time consuming activity, SMIL PhotoShow provides the users also the possibility to create, with only three

clicks, an engaging slideshows with transition effects and background music.

1 INTRODUCTION

With the introduction of digital photography, the

number of pictures taken has deeply increased, but

the number of printed pictures did not. This problem

deeply affects this market and is essentially due to the

fact that the huge number of photos requires a lot of

time to manage them: a picture can be saved, printed

as is, arranged into a more interesting photo book or

shared through the web. Since all these operations re-

quire time, people tend to save them in a local folder

and leave them for a period.

Printed albums are still considered the best way

to archive photos (Frohlich et al., 2002; Frohlich

et al., 2008), but can be used only to share memo-

ries between family members and friends who are in

the same place at the same time. Unfortunately, the

real life is often different, and families and groups

of friends are spread in different cities and countries.

This is one of the reasons for the success and diffusion

of social networks, e. g., Facebook. Nevertheless, the

way Facebook and other social networks manage the

photos is still insufﬁcient especially for what concern

the possibility to arrange pictures into a layout: the

same Facebook’s timeline is a ﬁrst attempt to give the

users the possibility to arrange pictures into a layout

to better represent themselves.

Slideshows of images synchronized with an audio

comment, in which the user descrives the pictures can

be a partial solution, but the authoring of such a pre-

sentation is still a complex and time consuming activ-

ity, and software that can be used to create a printed

album does not allow to create also a digital counter-

part which can be shared into a social network.

Therefore, to the best of our knowledge, there are

two possibilities to show pictures to other people and

discuss on them:

• in presence, with the help of a printed photo book.

In this case, the quality of the product offered to

the users is high, but the authoring activity is com-

plex and highly time-consuming;

• on line, with the help of features offered by social

networks to share pictures and discuss on them. In

this second case, the quality of the product is very

poor, but pictures are quickly and easily uploaded.

Our goal is to provide an easy-to-use tool for sharing

on line pictures in a more involving way, thus ﬁlling

the gap between social networks and photo book au-

thoring systems since many users still consider photo

books as the best way to archive memories, but they

cannot be shared on line. Therefore the possibility

to enhance their digital counterpart with animations,

transition effects, music and spoken comments, which

can be shared through the network, is interesting.

Moreover, another motivation for this work is that

Frohlich and Fennell (Frohlich and Fennel, 2007) de-

ﬁne audio commentary as one of the key functionali-

ties to be implemented to improve the sharing of ex-

periences depicted in photos.

This paper presents Smil PhotoShow, a prototype

authoring tool which allows to create simple slide-

show and complex animated photo books. Our tools

ﬁlls the gap between digital web albums and printed

photo books. The idea is to give the user an applica-

tion to create, at the same time, a photo book for later

Gaggi O..

Enhancing Photoware in the Social Networks Environment.

DOI: 10.5220/0004031600350039

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Signal Processing and Multimedia Applications and Wireless Information Networks and Systems

(SIGMAP-2012), pages 35-39

ISBN: 978-989-8565-25-9

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

printing, and a multimedia presentation to share with

friends, not only the taken pictures, but the experi-

ences they told. For this reason, we implement a tool

fully integrated in Facebook, since this social network

is the place chosen by many Internet users to share ex-

periences, pictures and, more in general, piece of their

life. The goal is to allow users to appreciate the result

of their work but also to have fun during the authoring

activity, since users can enjoy and share with friends

even the experience of creating a photo book.

Our tool gives two choices: the user can create an

animated slideshow, enriched with audio comments

and music, in very few clicks, or spend more time to

author a more sophisticated photo book enriched with

animations, transition effects, spoken comments and

music. The photo book is also translated into a pdf

ﬁle to be printed.

2 RELATED WORK

Other works in literature consider the problem of

managing photos. We can classify photo tools in three

classes: Photo Management Systems (PMS), Photo

Book Authoring Tools (PBAT) and the Photo shar-

ing tools (PST). PMSs allow to browse, date, geo-

localize, tag and organize pictures into folders or al-

bums. Their goal is to help the users to organize pic-

tures or to ﬁnd a set of images among a collection.

Sometimes they provide also photo editing tools.

PBATs organize photos into photo books for print-

ing. They usually help the user in this activity try-

ing to automatically create the photo book ﬁlling the

pages with pictures taken in the same place, or with

the same person, etc. These tools usually provide a

digital preview of the obtained result that cannot be

shared through the Internet. Finally PSTs allow to

share pictures with friends through the web.

Examples from the ﬁrst class are, among others,

(Ryu et al., 2011) and (Gomi and Itoh, 2011). Ryu

et al (Ryu et al., 2011) create a photo management

system which allows to automatically cluster photos

on the basis of user preferences and provides tools for

summarized visualization. Gomi and Itoh (Gomi and

Itoh, 2011) implement a photograph web browser to

cluster and navigate collection of pictures on the base

of location, time and person tagged in the photos.

Sandhaus et al describe the process of photo books

production as a complex activity divided in three

phases: the capture phase, the author phase and print

phase (Sandhaus et al., 2008). The authors identify

the second phase as the most time consuming and an-

noying activity. “Many for one” (Boll et al., 2007)

is a tool that automatically arranges the photos into

templates for printing. Moreover it enriches the photo

book by inserting interesting related information (e.

g. a text or pictures from a travel guide).

Flickr and Facebook are examples of the third

class of tools. The experience of users sharing photos

through web communities has been studied in (Cun-

ningham and Masoodian, 2007) and (Frohlich and

Fennel, 2007). They both highlight that interacting

with a web album must be more appealing to be re-

ally enjoyable for users.

These classes are not completely separated, e. g.

Apple iPhoto, is a PBAT which contains also some

feature of the PMSs, because it allows to tag and clas-

sify pictures. Google Picasa is a PMS which allows

also to share web albums with friends.

Storytelling is another means of conveying per-

sonal experiences through digital photos which

shares the same scenario described above: Storytellr

(Landry, 2008) is a system that integrates tasks of the

storytelling process with photo activities like annota-

tion and arrangements. PhotoArcs (Ames and Man-

guy, 2006) allows to add narratives to web photo al-

bums. The photos are organized into linear arcs con-

nected by text information. Different narratives may

intersect creating multiple versions of a story.

Some works cope with the problem of non-

existing connection between printed photos and their

digital counterpart. Gaggi and Ghidoni made a ﬁrst

step to allow users to create printed photo books and

enriched multimedia presentations with the same tool

at the same time (Gaggi and Ghidoni, 2010). They

arranged pictures into predeﬁned page layouts which

contains also animations and transition effects. The

tool gives as output a PDF ﬁle for printing and a SMIL

presentation, but the latter cannot be integrated into a

web page, and SMIL players are not commonly avail-

able in the users PC. For these reasons, this tool does

not allow to share animated photo books into the web,

but it requires a SMIL player.

3 SMIL PHOTOSHOW

SMIL PhotoShow is an authoring tool for animated

photo books fully integrated in Facebook, since this

social network is the platform chosen by millions

users to share pictures and personal information. To

improve the user experience during authoring activity,

we propose two possibilities: the user can quickly cre-

ate a slideshow of pictures, or a complete photo book.

The idea is to address two different requirements:

1. The need for an easy and really quick way to share

pictures which is more engaging of a simple web

album (animated slideshows);

SIGMAP2012-InternationalConferenceonSignalProcessingandMultimediaApplications

2. A tool to author photo books to be printed, but that

can also be shared inside the network.

The ﬁrst operation requires three clicks and less

than a minute, to select pictures (from Picasa or Face-

book), transition effects, and to uploads a background

music. If comments or caption are associated to a pic-

ture, they are visualized in parallel with it.

The second operation is more complex and time-

consuming, but provides a more engaging result.

SMIL PhotoShow provides a basic set of features to

create a photo book. It allows to create a new photo

book or modify an existing one, to import photos from

Facebook or Picasa Web Albums, to add or remove a

page, to modify the layout of a page and add pictures

and text comments on it. Moreover it allows to add

a background image to a page, a music or a spoken

comment to the multimedia presentation of the photo

book, and to generate a PDF ﬁle for later printing.

The system provides a set of predeﬁned page lay-

out which can be ﬁlled dragging the pictures from

a panel and dropping them in the selected frame. If

someone is tagged in a picture, the system automati-

cally add a comment with this information in the near-

est text box. Each page layout may contains anima-

tions and transition effects. Page layouts with transi-

tions are denoted by a star icon, and the presence of

animations are denoted by a triangle to help the user

in the selection (see Fig. 1). Moreover, the tool pro-

vides a set of predeﬁned background images which

can be used instead of a picture of the user.

The system provides two outputs for each created

photo book: a PDF ﬁle for printing and a multimedia

presentation, which shows all the pages of the photo

book, one at a time. The user can choose the interval

of time during which a single page remains on the user

screen, while the background music plays. Each page

plays animations and transition effects of the chosen

layout. Both slideshows and photo books can be pub-

lished in the user wall, or share with friends.

Since the reason why many users do not create

photo books is the time needed for this operation, we

think that the slideshows can be a way to interest users

to get a more sophisticated results: animated photo

books differ from slideshows for the introduction of

page layout and text comments. If the user like the

animated presentations created with the slideshows,

she/he can decide to spend more time to get a bet-

ter result. The assumption that users prefer activities

which give them a better result even if they require

more time is supported also by the fact that photo

books production is increasing better then the total

number of printed pictures. As an example, CeWe

Color produced about 4.3 million photo books in 2010

and this production has increased by 19% with respect

Figure 1: A screenshot of the authoring interface of SMIL

PhotoShow. The text comments were automatically added

on the base of the tags of the pictures.

to 2009 and by about 38% with respect to 2008, while

printed pictures increased only by 4.6% in the same

period (CeWe Color Holding AG, 2010).

3.1 System Implementation

The system is composed of two modules, Smiling

Web, a SMIL player (Gaggi and Danese, 2011) and

SMIL PhotoShow, an authoring tool fully integrated

in Facebook. SMIL PhotoShow contains the server-

side application, implemented using the PHP lan-

guage, and the client-side user interface, developed

with the JavaScript language.

The server-side application uses the JSON format

to exchange data with Facebook, e. g. data about

the user, her/his friends, and photographs, or data

about photo books and slideshows, and is encapsu-

lated in the social networks pages through an iframe.

It stores data about photo books and slideshows, e. g.,

date and time of creation, author, URLs, etc., into a

SQL database. To address privacy issues, the database

managed by our tool does not contains pictures, tags

or comments of the users, but only a references to

them. In this way, these objects are not exposed,

but can be accessed only inside the social network by

users with a proper account.

For each photo book or slideshow created, SMIL

Photo Show creates an XML ﬁle for internal use,

describing the element’s structure, i. e., number of

pages, the selected pictures, layout of each page, etc.

EnhancingPhotowareintheSocialNetworksEnvironment

Then, the XML ﬁle is translated into a SMIL docu-

ment containing the multimedia presentation, or into

a PDF ﬁle for printing. As discussed for the local

database, the XML ﬁles and the multimedia presen-

tations do not contain tags, pictures or comments in

order to address privacy issues. This is not true for

the printable photo book, which is a PDF ﬁle. There-

fore, to protect his/her privacy, the user can control

access to this ﬁle.

Facebook Graph API are used for the connection

to the social network and to retrieve data about the

user, his/her albums, photographs and friends. More-

over the social plug-in Comments is used to allow

discussion on the elements and the “I like” button.

Photographs from Google Picasa web albums are ac-

cessed through Zend Framework. The PDF version of

the photo book is created with free FPDF library.

The client-side application is implemented in

JavaScript and manages the user interface, e. g. the

available buttons, the drag and drop operations to

change the layout of a page, or to ﬁll a predeﬁned lay-

out with photographs. We paid particular attention to

make the tool works with all available browsers, to be

adaptable to user preferences. Animated photo books

and slideshows are played with SmilingWeb (Gaggi

and Danese, 2011).

4 USER EVALUATION

SMIL PhotoShow has been published at the end of

July, 2011, and it was used by 60 users: we invited 18

users to try the application, the others has found it by

themselves. The users have created more than 50 ele-

ments (i. e., photo books and slideshows)

of different

sizes, e. g., the number of pages of the photo books

ranges from 5 to 15. We ask the users to evaluate the

tool and give feedbacks through a questionnaire. 18

users answered to our questions.

The user study allows us to evaluate the tool, but

also its suitability to the target audience and the pos-

sible impact on the users’ choice among different au-

thoring tools and web communities for photo shar-

ing. The goal was to assess the interest of poten-

tial users in adding sound comments, animations and

transitions to standard photo books and the degree of

user-friendliness of the system for non expert users.

The 18 users who answered to the questions were

between 20 and 40 years old, selected both between

students of Computers Science degree and ordinary

people. We asked them to create a photo book and

The system does not keep trace of the slideshows and

photo books which has been deleted.

Figure 2: Answer to question 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 of the

questionnaire.

a slideshow and to answer, anonymously, to 17 multi-

ple choice questions. The questions deal with the user

degree of expertise in using applications for photo

book editing and photo sharing, their interest in the

application, the quality of the experience made with

SMIL PhotoShow and the obtained results. The users

rate the answers on a scale from 0 to 5 (0 = “strong

dislike”, 1 = “dislike”, 2 = “neutral”, 3 = “good”, 4

=“very good”, 5=“excellent”). A last open question

gives the possibility to express additional remarks.

The questionnaires revealed the following in-

sights. The result was positive, since 56% of the users

have declared to prefer an application that produces

as output also a digital animated photo book respect

to authoring tools which allow to create only printed

photo books. If we better consider our audience, the

majority of users declare they had used at least once a

program photo sharing (94%), but only 39% of them

have used an authoring tool for photo books. Their

degree of expertise is rather low since only 2 users

declared to have created more than 5 photo books in

their life. Even if our audience probably reﬂects a pic-

ture of the general population, we must note that, in

many cases, our tool is their ﬁrst experience with pho-

toware tools, and so they do not have experience of

time needed to create a photo book. This means that

they maybe cannot completely appreciate what our

tool provides more than the others. Therefore, 56%

is not a low percentage: we note that the users that

have declared a higher experience, also give a higher

evaluation to our tool.

The users reported a good experience in using

SMIL PhotoShow since all of them rated it with 3

or more points (mean 3.6, standard deviation 0.7, in

Figure 2, the answers to this question are labeled by

“Q9”). Moreover,67% of the users have declared they

will use our application to share pictures with friends.

The users preferred the animated photo book

(mean 3.6, most frequent value 4, series “Q13” in Fig-

ure 2) to the printed version (mean 3, most frequent

value 3, series “Q10” in Figure 2): only a user evalu-

SIGMAP2012-InternationalConferenceonSignalProcessingandMultimediaApplications

ated the animated photo book less than 3.

Users have highly evaluated the relationship be-

tween the quality of the result and the effort to get

it. This is particularly true for slideshows which were

rated with a score less than 4 (equal to “very good”)

by only one user (slideshow: mean 4.2, most frequent

value 4, see series “Q11” in Fig. 2; photo books:

mean 3.7, most frequent value 4, see series “Q12”

in Fig. 2), maybe because slideshows require only

3 clicks to be created.

Finally, some users reported that they highly ap-

preciated the simplicity of use of the tool.

5 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper we have presented SMIL PhotoShow, an

authoring tool for photo books production which al-

lows the creation of enhanced multimedia presenta-

tions with audio comments, transition effects and an-

imations. The photo book can be printed as a classic

photo books or shared through the web.

The main result of our system is the integration

of the storytelling paradigm into a software for pho-

towork. Since authoring a photo book is considered

by many users a time consuming activity, we test if

the integration of activity into the social network en-

vironment can help. Since millions users use Face-

book to share photos and memories, we choose to de-

veloped our tool as a Facebook application. The user

study has shown that 67% of the users declared they

will use our application to share pictures with friends,

therefore we can argue that the integration of photo-

ware tools into the social network paradigm can help

this kind of activity.

Moreover, the users have expressed very positive

comment on the slideshows and their narration, thus

the integration of the storytelling approach in the so-

cial networks environment was appreciated. More-

over, our study shows that the possibility to create, in

a very simple way, a simple photo composition, can

encourage users to spend more time in photoware ac-

tivity to obtain a better result.

Future works will be devoted to improve the set

of features of the authoring tool, by adding support

to geolocalization of photographs and suggestions of

pictures to include. Moreover, since our goal is to im-

prove and facilitate the authoring activity in order to

lower time it requires, we aims at providing a tool for

collaborative authoring of photo books with which a

group of friends can select and insert together photos,

comments and music.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank the many volunteers

who evaluated our tool for their helpful suggestions

and Luca Danese for his support in the development.

Partial ﬁnancial support for this work is provided

by MIUR/PRIN ALTER-NET and the UNIPD/PRAT

Web Squared projects.

REFERENCES

Ames, M. and Manguy, L. (2006). Photoarcs: a tool for cre-

ating and sharing photo-narratives. In CHI '06, pages

466–471.

Boll, S., Sandhaus, P., Scherp, A., and Westermann, U.

(2007). Semantics, content, and structure of many for

the creation of personal photo albums. In ACM Conf.

on Multimedia, pages 641–650, New York, NY, USA.

CeWe Color Holding AG (2010). CeWe Color Holding AG

FactBook.

Cunningham, S. J. and Masoodian, M. (2007). Identifying

personal photo digital library features. In ACM/IEEE-

CS joint conference on Digital libraries, pages 400–

401, New York, NY, USA. ACM.

Frohlich, D. and Fennel, J. (2007). Sound, paper and mem-

orabilia: resources for a simpler digital photography.

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11(2):107–116.

Frohlich, D., Kuchinsky, A., Pering, C., Don, A., and Ariss,

S. (2002). Requirements for photoware. In ACM conf.

on Computer supported cooperative work, pages 166–

175, New York, NY, USA. ACM.

Frohlich, D., Wall, S., and Kiddle, G. (2008). Collabora-

tive photowork: Challenging the boundaries between

photowork and phototalk. In CHI 2008.

Gaggi, O. and Danese, L. (2011). A smil player for any web

browser. In DMS 2011, pages 114–119.

Gaggi, O. and Ghidoni, F. (2010). Smilingphotos - bridg-

ing the gap between digital photo albums and printed

photo books. In WEBIST, pages 113–118.

Gomi, A. and Itoh, T. (2011). A personal photograph

browser for life log analysis based on location, time

and person. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Sympo-

sium on Applied Computing, SAC ’11, pages 1245–

1251. ACM.

Landry, B. M. (2008). Storytelling withdigital photographs:

supporting the practice, understanding the beneﬁt. In

CHI '08, pages 2657–2660.

Ryu, D.-S., Kim, K. H., Park, S.-Y., and Cho, H.-G. (2011).

A web-based photo management system for large

photo collections with user-customizable quality as-

sessment. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Sympo-

sium on Applied Computing, SAC ’11, pages 1229–

1236. ACM.

Sandhaus, P., Thieme, S., and Boll, S. (2008). Pro-

cesses of photo book production. Multimedia Systems,

14(6):351–357.

EnhancingPhotowareintheSocialNetworksEnvironment