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?

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? )

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.

@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.

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

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.

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.

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..?

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.

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.