Personal Photo Management and Preservation

Thanks to the spread of digital photography and available devices, taking photographs has become effortless and tolerated nearly everywhere. This makes people easily ending up with hundreds or thousands of photos, for example, when returning from a holiday trip or taking part in ceremonies, concerts, and other events. Furthermore, photos are also taken of more mundane motives, such as food and aspects of everyday life, further increasing the number of photos to be dealt with. The decreased prices of storage devices make dumping the whole set of photos common and affordable. However, this practice frequently makes the stored collections a kind of dark archives, which are rarely accessed and enjoyed again in the future. The big size of the collections makes revisiting them time demanding. This suggests to identify, with the support of automated methods, the sets of most important photos within the whole collections and to invest some preservation effort for keeping them accessible over time. Evaluating the importance of photos to their owners is a complex process, which is often driven by personal attachment, memories behind the content, and personal tastes that are difficult to capture automatically. Therefore, to better understand the selection process for photo preservation and future revisiting, the first part of this chapter presents a user study on a photo selection task where participants selected subsets of most important pictures from their own collections. In the second part of this chapter, we present methods to automatically select important photos from personal collections, in light of the insights emerged from the user study. We model a notion of photo importance driven by user expectations, which represents what photos users perceive as important and would have selected. We present an expectation-oriented method for photo selection, where information at both photo and collection levels is considered to predict the importance of photos.