Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

Figured I'd share two thoughts I had regarding photos and integration and see what, if any, reactions there are to them.

First, with the possibility to geotag photos, wouldn't it be natural to have a deeper integration with Maps? Looking at a geotagged photo, wouldn't it be nice to be able to -- with a couple of clicks -- bring up the maps application focused at that location? I am not sure if the exact coordinates are stored in addition to country and city (are they?), but if they were that would make the feature even better. While in maps, I would also like to be able to call up thumbnails of all geotagged photos, situated at the right location (like google maps). These features would give a whole new dimension to browsing your photos, IMHO.

Secondly, we often take photos of friends and family. We might also tag these photos with the names of the people on them. Could it be nice to integrate these tags with the contacts application? Looking at a photo that integration could make it possible to bring up a persons post in the contacts application. The usefulness of this is not immediate to me, but it sort of feels like the right thing to do...

What do you think? :)

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

I wanted this ages ago for the N8x0.

IIRC, new versions of EOG do his for photos on the GNU/Linux desktop. I'd really prefer a solution that's independent from the maps-application on the N900 (or is configurable to use several map backends), so whatever we'll get in the end will still run on older models.


About people:
The problem with people is that to provide a good user experience, tagging should work for other peoples' photos as well. (And, of course, your tagged images should be recognized on my device should we have common contacts.)
Also, the solution must not break existing standards (which means we have to ask ourselves: where to put the information in EXIF/IPTC?)

Identifying people isn't a trivial task. In RDF-based solutions like FOAF we use either unique URIs or inverse functional properties. - URIs are ideal, but hardly useful for what we want to do here and now. There's something that FOAF uses, though, that we also find in our contacts: the email address. FOAF assumes that there are certain mail addresses that are unique to one person; these email addresses can be used to identify a person (or even a group of people).
My personal mail account is such an address. OTOH, if I enter office@acmecorp.com as my friend Lisa's address in the address book (because Lisa works at Acme Corp. and doesn't have internet at home), we run into problems... I might also know Lisa's best friend Sue, who also happens to work at Acme Corp. and doesn't have an account other than office@acmecorp.com.

In order to use the email address as an inverse functional property for identifying people, we should have a checkbox somewhere in an interface (for one of the applications used in the whole chain) that says: this mail address belongs to one person only, use it to identify this person.

The charming thing is that if we both know Rick, ad I tag a photo "rick@rainbowsarefree.com" and send it to you, it will integrate with your contact application as well.

(Other inverse functional properties used in the FOAF-universe, btw, are the homepage, the blog or an online account of a person. So while Lisa and Sue above share the same mail address in my address book, I might happen to know that each of that has a jabber-account of her own. I would choose Jabber instead of mail then in the interface, and it would still work for everybody who has complete contact data of Sue and Lisa.)

Don't get me started on all this or soon we'll have an RDF-based web of knowledge on our devices... (tracker already is RDF-based, isn't it? :D )

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

If you look at the properties of a photo that's been tagged on the N900, there's a button that takes you straight to where it was taken on Maps, but only if it was geotagged via GPS, as far as I know.

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

@benny
I see your point and obviously agree portability would be a dream scenario. I thought it was pretty much a utopia since it involves standardization (or at least so I was thinking). To be honest I don't even know how tagged photos work today, is the tag information portable to other platforms and between applications? Is it stored in the EXIF? I was under the impression that at least the geotags were stored only locally on the device.

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

For real? Nice... Well that makes that part of my post quite obsolete...

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

I don't know how Maemo does it, but if done properly, there's a standard that says where/how to store

• GPS latitude/longitude/altitude/...
• state
• country
• city

All of this within the photo, not locally in some database.

There's, as far as I know, no standard that says "put the email address of the person on this photo in this field". however, one may want to look at the standards involved (mainly EXIF and IPTC) and see if there's fields that allow, say, entering private data or "additional information about the image" or whatever... then it's only a matter of making it clear that the address you find there was originally written by a Maemo device and is meant to identify a person as defined by the guidelines set by Maemo-application XY.

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

not really... as long as it's tied to one specific map application.

you may find that for whatever reason (performance, accuracy, design,...) you prefer a different map application.

and I prefer to have all this on my N810. :D

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

I had never heard of IPTC before (thanks for teaching me), but apparently it contains an abundance of fields. Among other a number pertaining to contact information, including multiple email adresses. That contact information is however supposed to point to the creator of the photo, There is also a field called "keywords" which seems more aimed towards what we call tags...

http://iptc.cms.apa.at/std/photometa...00907%29_1.pdf

The list of software supporting IPTC is however less than impressive. I couldn't find a corresponding hardware list but suppose the chances of anything Nokia or maemo supporting it are slim..?

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

That may be true for the quick launching of the map application from within a photobrowser (which indeed was what I outlined in the first post) but assuming the location data is stored as it should in the exif, isn't it really up to the map application in question if it can parse the exif for the location data?

Oh, and yeah, I want it too. All of it. On the N900. :)

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

Depends. A Map application might, for example, fully integrate with the photo browser and let you select an "overlay" (similar to google earths data sources) in which it shows thumbnails of all images taken within the area you're viewing.

Another map application might not know about EXIF or photos at all, but may be able to take latitude/longitude as command line parameters and at least show some marker at the position indicated via this mechanism. this would be good enough for locating one single image from a file manager or image browser.

a third application may be an image viewer that shows a small map in the properties window along with other exif data in textual form.

there are many possibilities, and depending on what you're up to, you'll want to choose one of them today and the other tomorrow. - this is why i would love not to be tied to the map application that comes with the N900.

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

Agreed. Well, a standalone map application could always display thumbnails or otherwise indicate photolocations as long as it has access to the photos and the ability to read the metadata (assuming the coordinates are stored in a universal manner, not only in the correct field but also in a universal format. Maybe that is an issue in itself). That is not bad start but for integration in the sense I am talking about, I suppose a photo browser either has to have map functionality built in or "awareness of" and "compatibility with" the map application in question, which, I suppose, is where it gets tricky. The details immensely exceed my knowledge, but I presume they involve some sort of API, preferrably standardized, for the map application. Vice versa if you would want to go from the maps application and bring up one of those overlayed images in a photobrowser. Is that where the crux of the matter lies, perhaps, a (standardized) photo-interface in between applications?

From a personal perspective I would however take integration of native applications over no integration at all. Maybe not in the long run, but surely in the short run.. Actually, with the integration pointed out by zerojay the part missing is for the maps application to be able to bring up thumbnails of images, and possibly ability to open up the photobrowser when one of those thumbnails were selected. Could we have that, please? :)

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

Seems like something (eventually) for Brainstorm?

(Although IMO waiting for final hardware/software in hands before going Brainstorm is Good Thing.)

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

Oh, and btw:

Right. In fact, popular web-services extract information like title, description and tags from exactly these fields when you upload an image that contains such info. And yes, there's no field I'd know of that is exclusively meant for including "the email address of the person depicted".

Doesn't matter much, though. One could do one of three things:

a) Use tags, as you proposed. The tag wouldn't read "joe@his.net", though, but "person:mail=joe@his.net". This way it will be easy to find for applications looking for it - and will still make sense to those who only take tags as non-structured words. (flickr did this before they had proper geotagging: You could prefix tags with something like "geo..." to give latitude/longitude in an plain-text field.)

b) Find yet another field that's usually not presented to humans by photo viewing software. (Tags, titles, descriptions, dates etc. are)
It's prettier (because we never don't get to see the cryptic "person:mail=joe@his.net") and has another advantage... which i'll discuss later. ;)

c) Use XMP. XMP was an attempt by Adobe to bring the flexibility of RDF to image metadata. I hear there are architectural issues with it, but in general people say it's expandable - which means: It has a set of pre-defined fields, but you can add your own and give them a well-defined meaning. Adding existing FOAF-attributes to XMP-tags could work, because both are RDF-based. This would save us the work of defining anything Maemo-specific. We'd just use 2 existing standards that live within the same framework. (I'm a little worried though that I don't find any examples of FOAF in XMP via google... maybe there is an issue with XMP I don't know about.)

One general issue with using mail addresses as identifiers, of course, is privacy. You tag a photo, send it to your brother, he passes it on to his friends, one of them puts it on flickr... and suddenly the mail address of the person on the image is publicly available as a tag on flickr.
This shouldn't happen.

FOAF faced the same challenge. They found a way to securely cipher the mail address so that it's still unique, but will come out as a meaningless string of letters and numbers. Only if you already have the same mail address in your contacts you can compare the two by using the same algorithm... but it's not possible to reverse the process.
So, "person:mail=joe@his.net" would be changed within the image to "person:mail=eea5dd38a317c5051438e70bdfa8f3ccfbffa 88d", and we certainly don't want to see this in any tag/title/description. This is why i think solution b) or c) would be more appropriate.

It's a cool thing, really. I remember there were discussions about solution c) on various mailing lists some years ago; don't know why I never got to see a real-world implementation. I hope it was only people being too lazy, not some real technical problem.

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

About person on image:

What you are interested in is XMP. Exif is more for technical data and IIM (commonly known as IPTC) is considered obsolete.

In XMP you are interested in Iptc4xmpExt and tag PersonInImage this is bag type so you can put in it your own format, preferably XML of course.

About maps: I really hope N900 (and its successors) will use real GPS tags and not GSM tricks (which are evil BTW). With them things are really easy. Anyone porting digiKam to ARM? ;)

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

On a related note, does anyone know if the photo browser in maemo 5 allows browsing photos by tags?

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

If GPS is active and has a lock, it will tag using GPS coordinates. If not, it calculates position from proximity to GSM towers and estimates. I don't see how estimating position from GSM towers is "evil". You're going to have to explain that one to me.

Yes, you can browse by tag.

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

On a different related note, the maps integration could be extended to contacts; we know where they live, at least by address (and why shouldn't we be able to geotag our contacts when we visit them?). Isn't it the most natural thing in the world to integrate that information with a map application?
* Get a map thumbnail of their home in a contacts application
* Click the thumbnail (or a button) to bring up a map application focused at their home and/or work
* Click a button in a map application to bring up an overlay with all our contacts' names and "profile pictures" at their home and/or work
* In the map application, browse to one of your contacts, click and get to their details in the contacts application.

Oh, and about the use for photos linked to contacts; you could not only easily recall who that person in the photo was and how to reach him, in a contacts application you could directly see which photos you have associated with each person and for instance from those pictures have a natural selection of profile pics.

Is it just me or does this make perfect sense? :D

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

doesn't personinimage (no matter if in plain iptc or in the xmp version) refer to the name of the person only? (I only read the spec now after your post, so i don't really know for sure.)
if so, my family couldn't use it to tag photos: my father and i, we have exactly the same name. if you tag photos with this name, you can't search for me and only me.

also, in the N900 use case, we have to expect that some people enter contacts as "dad", "home", "sweetheart" and "peter's office". while the name is useless in such a situation, they may still have a unique mail address or other unique properties for these contacts.

are there examples of how to use PersonInImage with information other than the persons name anywhere? sounds interesting if it's as flexible as you say in XMP.

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

I am sure that could be solved by defining tags as pointers to the real contact post/person. Maybe not inside the metatags, but when interfacing say a photobrowser and a contacts application.
When you create a new tag in the photobrowser, give the user the possibility to connect it with a contact or, in contact application, let user choose a nickname for the contact. Let that nickname be automatically available for tagging.

Re: Maps and contacts integration for photos
 

Specification isn't in stone :) I suspect in future standard will be expanded to include more details about person in image in more ordered way. Now this tag is the best thing to use IMO. Of course you can even create your own namespace and put there data but there is NULL chance any popular software will be able to process it properly.
Traditional systems used two simply methods:
John Smith I, John Smith II (don't confuse with anglo-saxon John Smith 1st, John Smith 2nd, etc.) or
John Smith (date of birth, date of death) - hard to use with living persons.
I think in this usecase the best way is to use e-mail to differentiate persons and adjust software to make e-mail addresses clickable.

Well, for "Peter's Office" you have OrganisationInImageName ;)
But unless to use your photos as stock material I don't see any obstacles to put there not only "proper" names but nicks, relationship descriptions, etc.

XMP is flexible but it has to be implemented. Iptc4xmpExt is quite young standard.