A recent trend in the digital photography sectorhas been the advent and affordability of highcapacity digital media. CES 2008 saw theintroduction of the world’s first 32 Giga Bytemedia from Panasonic. To quote a kiosk maker -“the new media today have more capacity thanthe hard disks in our kiosks!” This seemingly unlimited capacity to store photographs has ledto what some people call Egg ConsolidationFans – i.e. Digital Photography enthusiasts whocan continue to snap pictures without worrying about archiving or deleting the pictures for longperiods of time or the digital photography equivalent of putting of all one’s eggs in a singlebasket.
“In digital camera terms, the (32 GB) card shouldbe able to store around 6800 images from thelatest 12MP compacts (assuming an average filesize of around 4.5MB per image). Or more than190 rolls worth of 36 exposure film, for those whostill think in such terms. Certainly enough to lastfor even the most shutter-happy holidays.”- From DPReview’s report from CES2008
The side effect of this miracle drug comes at the time of printing. The user has to scan from a possible 6800 images and choose the dozen or so preferred ones for print. With an average scan time per screenshot of 10 images being roughly 15
seconds, the entire task of scanning and choosing pictures by a single user during the holiday season will take him or her anywhere from 20 minutes up
to an hour. The bottle neck in print time as evident here is not on the system side but on the user side. One hour of unavailability of a photo kiosk is likely
to turn away at least two other customers in peak season not to mention the initial user’s patience at the kiosk.
One way to address this issue is to exploit an often overlooked part of digital pictures – the information headers or metadata. These fields are updated by
most cameras with details of each shot relative to the camera settings. The information coded within this metadata is available through any photo
editing software or web application. These are usually presented in camera friendly terms such as focal length, ISO value, shutter speed etc. Software libraries should aim to make use of these established technical headers and present them in user friendly terms through the photo kiosk. SCM has developed algorithms to present the same pictures in easily recognizable sets such as portraits, night shots, black and white pictures and many others.
Some of the filters include:
• from a particular date (like a birthday or
holiday)
• only the most recent
• from an outdoor event
• from a certain location
• portraits or close up shots
• scenic or wide angle shots
• black and white pictures only
Digital Media 