Since then the idea has continued to pop into my thoughts demanding refinement. As a follower of GTD principles I figured that if I was to ever stop my brain from tinkering with this I’d better start jotting things down. Hopefully that’ll save me from having to keep track of things in my head and this constrantly rummaging around up there.

So where does this leave us? Being a visually oriented person, my first stop is the main screen and how it should work.

The PictoSense screen layout

Borrowing ideas from existing applications I managed scape together a first stab at a screen design without too much effort. Below you’ll see one of several screen mock ups that I’ve come up with: “map room”. Other designs, yet to be illustrated, will follow the same idea but instead of having a world map you see the “image carousel” or the “relationships map“.

The map room screen

The main features of this screen are a map with tagged locations, a timeline browser and a keyword browser. All 3 elements will interact with each other such that changing say the zoom level on the map will influence the timeline and keywords displays.

Features of the world map

The user is able to zoom and pan the map (1), switch between several views (2) such as Sattelite, Map or hybrid. On the map the user will find either markers (icons or thumbnails) representing locations where pictures were taken. The location of the markers is derived from the picture’s latitude and longitude meta data fields.

The number of markers on the map is constrained by all of the following criteria:

• Area of the map: you will not see any markers for locations not directly visible on the screen. (This may sound silly but you would not believe what I’ve seen coded across my professional experience.)
• The “current window” of the timeline browser: You will only see markers for images for which the capture date (an Exif metadata field) falls between the start and end dates that the “current window” specifies.
• The selected keyword(s) if any: You will only see markers which relate to the selected keywords. If no keywords are selected (or available) the map contents will not be constrained by this criteria.

Markers on the map can be either pictures or icons. Clicking on a marker will pop-up a larger version of the image along with selected meta data information (e.g. caption, keywords, capture date, etc.)

Features of the timeline browser

The user is able to see a timeline representing all the images in the library. Within this timeline he can set a “time window” which acts as a constraint for the world map, carousel or relationships map. The timeline has a histogram representing the number of images captured at a given point in time.

The timeline will be constrained by the earliest and latest caputure time of all images in the library. The time interval markers (eg. year, month, week day) will vary depending on the time span of the library. Several implementations are possible (see example 1, example 2, and a really neat one).

Features of the keyword list

The user is able to see keywords of all the pictures within the current “time window”. The size of the keywords is relative to the number of times each keyword appears within the set of images. Selecting one or more keywords will constrain the number of markers on the map. Unselecting a keyword will remove the constraint.

The selected keywords will not cause the size of the histogram to change. They will however cause the histogram bars (dates) of the related pictures to be highlighted. This will occur for the entire timeline and not just the current “time window”. This gives a visual form of feedback to the user of the times at which selected pictures were taken without modifying the height of the histogram which would be distracting.

Further thinking

The screen design and features are very early in their lifecycle at this stage. There are many more things which need to be considered and which during the writing of this have tickled my brain. What options should be provided, what happens to slections on changes in the “time window” etc.

For now though, there’s enough on paper for my brain to stop playing tricks on me by calling this topic to the forefront at the most inappropriate of times.

The libary

As you may recall, I’m pretty anal when it comes to the family’s picture archive. When we purchased our first digital camera what feels like eons ago, I quickly realized that we would end up with fairly large library over the years. And as with any largish library it would need management. So I set about tagging the images, a tedious but necessary evil if we were ever to make sense of the thing 20 years down the line. I won’t go into the details of the workflow here and just mention that I tag pretty much anything for: who took the shot, the person in the shot and the location it was taken at.

Recently I’ve started wondering how this data can be put to good use. My current toolset can very nicely tell me what I generally need to know, where something was taken, by whom etc. It will only tell me those things because I know the tools. That’s fine as long as I’m the only user, but that’s not really the point of the library. How could this library be made accessible to others (e.g family and friends) and if so what are the salient features I would put at their disposal given the meta-data at hand?

After a little pondering a couple of things seem essential: a timeline, locations, and people. Whomever would have access would like to have the ability to sort and filter data based on these criteria. These are fairly simple features which I’m sure can be found in a number of user friendly pieces of software.

Architecting a new libary

Yet how do you bring those to the user in an entertaining way? The idea of entertainment also seems a key criteria. Whomever would view our library would likely not be looking to trudge through thousands of pictures. Rather, this person would be interested in the story that the pictures tell.

Figuring out what the libary viewer, for lack of a better name, would look like and how its usage could be desinged is what’s been prickling my mind. The way I go about figuring this out is to answer the following question: “What are the storylines one could derive from the meta-data in the library?” It’s not the easiest of questions to answer and If you’d like to participate then please feel free to comment…

Time and space:

For one we can use locations pictures were taken over time using the location information and the time a picture was taken. For this I envisage a map of the world with a bracketed timeline. The map would display pictures, or rather some form of reference to pictues for a given time bracket. These references could be bubbles which vary in size with the number of pictures that were taken around a given location for instance. The timeline would function very much like the one found on Google Finance. It would allow you to set the width of the bracket (i.e how many days, months etc. to take into account) and allow you to slide that bracket over time. When you slide the bracket the references on the map would change in accordance.

The timline and map would work in conjunction to filter the pictures to those that you’re interested in. Other features would include the ability to zoom in and out on the map and the ability to click on a reference (bubble) to further filter the pictures. The pictures themselves could be listed in several ways although my personal preference would go to a filmstrip type of listing.

Relationships

Another idea would be to use the people in the shot. As each picture has an author and one or more people in the picture one can establish a sense of relation both between the author of the shot and his subjects as well as betwen people in the shot.

The first thing that springs to mind in this regard is a graphical representation of relations between the people. The strengh of the relation would be relative to the number of times any 2 people were in the same shot together. Something like the Visual Thesaurus would be an interesting start piont The central weight points could be around the authors as they’d could be considered to be in every shot - that’s debatable though, one should see how this works out in the data representation.

One could thus navigate the picture database solely based on the relations of people. Selecting one or multiple people would filter the number of people in the shot.

A second feature which could be added is the timeline. This could be achieved in very much the same way as with the “Time and Space” idea such that selecting a time-frame would restrict the number of people shown.

Further afield

I’m sure that there’s more ways to view this information, but for now my brain is fried - I am sick after all… To be continued then.

Do leave me a comment or two in case you want to contribute

For reasons yet unexplained I plugged in his URL this morning and lo and behold there it was: Memorio Technica. Today’s going to be a good day it seems.

As could be expected of such an intriguing piece of software it had a bit of a rocky launch. The public’s enthusiasm overwhelmed the servers and Microsoft had to shut down part of the service to add some more capacity.

At any rate. I’m sure I’ll be testing it out, as soon as they release a Mac version.

a word cloud of badsoda.com by Wordle

During this search a few themes have really amazed me. Not only were their designs a true work of art - worthy of the best CSS as found on sites like CSS Zen Garden - their code was well optimized, search engine friendly and supported widgets and popular plugins right out of the box.

One desiger however truly stood out. I’d like to take a moment a moment to applaud the work R. Bhavesh in this regard. He is no stranger to well designed sites themes, having recieved recognition from places such as Smashing Magazine for his WP Premium theme as well has the WP Remix theme. Among the 20+ themes on his site, premiumthemes.net, you will find one called: SimpleSite. It strikes just the right balance on all aspects which I find important:

• a stong design and continuous user experience throughout.
• great support for popular plugins such as Contact-Form, Gravatar, Social BookMarking, Ajax rating etc.
• multi-level drop menu ready, which if you’ve ever tried to implement this on top of an existing theme you know you’ll spend hours on.
• supports a dynamic photo gallery allowing you to simply write a post, upload an image and the thumb will automatically be displayed in home and portfolio pages.
• flexible placement of the sidebar right from within the admin tools.
• and much more ….

Why on earth don’t I implement this theme if it’s so good? Well sadly I’m not in a position to shell out the necessary cash to implement it on a site for which there is little traffic. Call me cheap, 50% of my blood is after all dutch.

That being said and for the more fortunate readers I really encourage you to have a look at what PremiumThemes has to offer.

Anyway that’s not what this is about. I’ve been messing with the Theme of the site again. While I liked the HemingwayEx theme very much, there were just a few things that I could not live with. Particularly the fact that there were only two or so posts on the home page.

So I’ve put up a new theme for now. I haven’t found one that completely suits me yet so I guess that I’ll hack one together. Not today though. I only have 15 more minutes of battery life.

That changed recently when I came across QR-Codes. QR Codes are a particular implementation of a two dimensional bar code. They are similar to a linear (1-dimensional) barcode, like the ones you find on products at your local supermaket, but have more data representation capability.

What I had failed to realize up to now is that these systems encode data, whatever this data may be. While your typical UPC or EAN barcode, which is used in retail, only has the ability to handle 12 decimal digits the more recent encoding systems go way beyond this. In the case of QR-Codes you’re able to encode over 4000 alpha numeric characters. This opens up a whole new market of possibilities.  

Stop and think for a second about it. What information can be conveyed to you in 4000 characters? What are the typical things for which you re-encode information as you move from one medium to another? What information is prone to “write once - read many” situations where the medium carrying the message does not have inherent technology to support the reading?

Top of mind for me would be books. Encoding such things as title, author, year of publication, publisher, anything within the ONIX standard would be really useful. Imagine you’re a shopkeeper and you have the ability to add titles to your catalogue simply by scanning the barcode! Another example would be encoding of IPTC and EXIF information on the back of printed photos. On the more sensitive side you could imagine encodig personal details such that instead of inserting your ID card or bank card into a reader you would just swipe them in front of a camera. The possiblities are limitless.

Having arrived yesterday and after day of shopping and good food - and the inevitable walking around town - we went to the thearte. We saw “Le Dieu du carnage“ or rather “The God of Carnage” by Yasmina Reza with Isabelle Huppert at the “théâtre Antoine”. The play had gotten some pretty good reviews and did not dissapoint despite a small moment where even the actors got caught up into the spirit of things and shared a giggle.

After resting a little - did I mention we walked a lot - we headed off to the restaurant. It is located on the enchanting “Ile Saint Louis” in the middle of the Seine. Our resevation at “Mon Vieil Ami” was at 9:30 which gave us plenty of time to lounge around and enjoy the sunset. Upon arriving at the restaurant we were told to wait a few minutes while our table was being dressed. That’s when, to my utter surprise I recognized one of the other patrons in the place: Prince Philippe and one of his daughters (I can’t remember which one). Not wanting to intrude on what was obviously a familiy outing we did not press for an autograph or a handshake. Besides, the security detail had already taken note of our recognizing him. After he’d stepped out we were shown to our table. The meal was very pleasant and although the starters were not so great they more than made up for it with an excellent main dish and a great dessert. The wine was good, and more importantly well priced. Given all of that this place definitly has my thumbs up.

This morning we took it easy and headed down to the Eiffel tower after breakfast. We didn’t go up because a) there was a huge line and b) the top floor was temporarily closed. After wandering a bit we headed down to the Marais, the jewish quarter of Paris centered around rue de Rosiers, to get some food and shop for gifts for the kids. As is now customary for us we got our sandwiches from the famed Jewish boulangerie, Sacha Finkelsztajn“. If you are ever to go there you can’t miss the the signature yellow facade.

After eating our pastrami sandwiches we headed over to the Maison européenne de la photographie where an expo of Valerie Belin was taking place. It was an enjoyable visit although her work it seems did not quite do it for my wife. It was now getting time for us to get our bags and head home. The kids were surely waiting for us and we were equally anxious to see them agan. After a short trainride we were back home, in Brussels, and the weekend was over, it had gone just as quickly as I had feared.