iPhoto 2: Who, What, When, and Where

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expressions in multiple media

iPhoto 2: Who, What, When, and Where

An Open Letter to Steve Jobs

Greetings Steve,

iPhoto looks great! The book making feature nails the dominant demographic for photos: women! I can now offer my wife a digital photography solution. Kudos!

Next, iPhoto 2 needs to go beyond solving the shoebox storage problem. Photos need to be tagged with "when, where, what, and who".

When

Cameras can date-and-time stamp photos now. Can that info be carried thru the import process, and then used intelligently? For instance, I want to find all my ìChristmas 2001î photos, so iPhoto 2 should find all photos with a date stamp between December 20th and Jan 2nd. Holidays, vacations, birthdays, and anniversaries can all have dates and date ranges.

Where and What

Tagging photos with GPS data is probably a larger industry issue, but you have the influence to get this going. GPS-on-a-chip is here; perhaps an iCamera from Apple that kick starts this integration? (BTW, the GPS data only needs to be accurate to within a mile, so interference inside buildings could be overcome with a ìlast known positionî algorithm.) Then, iPhoto 2 could use this information intelligently to help me find all my Yosemite photos. Add a digital compass, and iPhoto might also be able to guess what the camera was pointing at (i.e. In the direction of Half Dome). Intelligent GPS and orientation data can be continuously compiled on Apple's servers.

Who

Tagging photos with names of people is actually going to be easy. Go acquire or license a face recognition algorithm, then add a UI to iPhoto 2 to ìhighlight a faceî and give it a name. Allow the user to repeat this for several instances of each personís face, then let iPhoto 2 automatically scan all the new and existing photos to find that person and add a tag. Now iPhoto 2 can help me find all pictures that have my child and her grandma in them. (And of course, integrate all of this with the Address Book.)

Additional Annotations: Text and Voice

To make the whole experience complete, let me add a text and/or audio annotation to a photo, and incorporate that into the slide show, web page, and iDVD output experiences.

I bet you've already thought of these, but I wanted to share these ideas with you anyway. BTW, I really want to work at Apple again. Any chance I could help you with this?

Peace

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