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Resources
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Time & Place
- everywhere
by Kentaro Toyama
Digital photos
can come with auxiliary information embedded in the photo file:
the camera make and model the time when the photo was shot, the
aperture settings, and so forth. This auxiliary information is called
metadata, and it's inserted into the file that your camera outputs
as a digital photo. Although most people care about a photo's pixels,
rather than its metadata, metadata can provide good
cues for organizing, browsing, and finding your photos, and more
importantly, it can aid in telling your story.
There are two
pieces of metadata that provide the context of a photo: date &
time and geographic location. Knowing that a photo was taken on
your birthday last year, for example, or that a photo was taken
at Disneyland, says a lot about the photo even before you see a
single pixel. If you think a bit about your favorite
photographs, there's a good chance that time, place, or both immediately
come to mind. In many cases, you'll associate photos with
an event, such as "John and Mary's wedding," but events
themselves are defined by where and when they happened.
So, how do we
go about acquiring this information, and what do we do with it once
we have it?
Metadata Acquisition
Date & time
are easy to acquire - almost all digital cameras have an internal
clock, and every photograph you snap is stamped with the date and
time without any extra effort on your part. Note that this information
is stored digitally, and it exists even if you can't see the date
at the lower-right corner of the photo that some cameras burn into
an image. In fact, there's no real reason to enable the date burn-in
feature unless you want the date to appear in prints; you can always
determine the date on a digital photo using photo software. Of course,
for all of this, it's important to keep your clock set to the correct
date and time.
Geographic location
is harder to come by. There are a handful of high-end cameras on
the market that can connect to a GPS device and which automatically
enter location information into the photo file. For those of us
who don't own such a camera, there are two methods for attaching
this valuable location information to the photograph, both of which
require special software.
- The first
way is to manually drag and drop photos onto a map once the photo
is on your computer. This can be tedious.
- The second
way is to purchase a handheld GPS device and carry it on your
person whenever you shoot photos. Handheld GPS units typically
store a time-stamped record of where they've been, so it's possible
to transfer the location data stored on the GPS device onto a
photo by matching time stamps.(see fig A.)
Choosing a GPS
device
There are several
features that you should look for when shopping for a GPS device
for the purpose of location-stamping your photos:
- It must have
a time-stamped track memory that keeps a record of where you've
been whenever it's on (this is different from manually entered
"waypoints");
- It must have
a way for you to upload that information to your PC (you may have
to buy a separate cable that connects the GPS device to your computer);
and
- The track
memory should be large. For our current recommendations, see:
http://wwmx.org
Fun with Metadata
Once your photos
are time-stamped and location-stamped, software allows you to take
advantage of this information in a variety of ways. Software that
can make sense of location-stamped photos is just now beginning
to appear on the mainstream market. An experimental research project,
The World Wide Media Exchange (wwmx) is an example of one *type*
of software. (see Figure B)
The MX Client
lets you browse photos by time and location. As you navigate in
the map panel to different parts of the globe and set the timeline
to a particular time interval, the photos in the thumbnail panel
show only those photos which were taken somewhere on the visible
map and between the dates you selected. Setting the time interval
to 2003 in the timeline and navigating to New York on the map shows
you all photos with a New York location stamp that were taken in
2003.
The MX Client
also lets you author simple, photo-centric travelogues. Dragging
and dropping photos from the thumbnail panel to the storyboard in
the Story Author panel adds photos to your travelogue. You can add
"pop-tag" annotations by dragging a rectangle on any portion
of the image. Context maps that show where each photo was taken
are included automatically. You can then pack a completed travelogue,
and send it to friends, who will be able to view it with the MX
Story Viewer.
If you search
on the web for "travelogue OR travelog," you'll find links
to a host of travelogues, the majority of which are painstakingly
hand-crafted (for a beautiful travelogue designed professionally,
see http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/appalachianTrail/;
the Flash version is particularly nice. This should give you a taste
of what's possible with metadata and encourage you to location-stamp
photos now, in anticipation of future products that capitalize on
this metadata. As time goes on, software that automates much of
this process will appear on the market - and you'll be able to take
advantage of it!
For recent updates
to the Media eXchange Client, go to:
http://wwmx.org/
go to: additional
information
about WWMX project
back to: resources
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