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23 Dec 2007
Toward intrinsic flow
Now that I looked at several applications, which work with photos and have the intention to support story creation, I start to wonder what I am looking for. The applications that I looked at put the context and the story line outside the photos. It is up to the author to do the authoring of the story. Thus the author arranges the photos on album pages in the order he wants, adds context, such as explanatory text and embellishes the presentation with extra imagery, animations, etc.
And the story line is strictly linear, going from page to page in an album, or from photo to photo in a slideshow. If we are lucky the application can populate an album through an iPhoto Album, thus setting the order of the images. And if we are lucky the title and caption of photos are used to add text to the album.
I see this as a move from an extrinsic to intrinsic story flow. Where we first had to all the work by hand, the applications can now give us a hand by populating the possible flow. And with the increasing number of image we now generate each year (I am now in the 700), this help is really needed.
This automation can only work if we increase the amount of metadata associated with each photo. This metadata can be the title, the date, a caption. But also locations and sorting through events or hand-picked albums. Next step is to annotate the things in the image itself.