iPhotobook: creating photo books on mobile devices

The amount of photo that is captured and stored with mobile devices is growing rapidly. We regularly see traditional desktop multimedia applications being ported to mobile devices. However, less often do we see novel interaction mechanism being developed to effectively deal with the physical limitations of the display and input of such devices. We built a mobile application called iPhotobook that enables users to create and edit photo books on iPhones. The application leveraged image analysis algorithms to automate user tasks of photo selection, grouping, editing and layout that would be difficult to accomplish without a large screen input. In this paper, we present these technologies and more importantly illustrate how they work together seamlessly with a gesture based user interface that creates a fun photo book authoring experience. Although the iPhone is our platform of choice and photo book creation is our target application, our innovations on UI design and automation algorithms may well be generalized to other small screen devices and applied to other mobile media applications.