User-centric Metadata for Mobile Photos

Consumers are overwhelmed by the amount of personal media they create themselves and the media others share with them. They are gradually facing the problem how to use, manage, and organize all this personal media. Public and commercial media archives have traditionally addressed this media management problem by having metadata describing the content of the media. This approach, however, has two inherent problems in the domain of consumer media: lack of end user motivation for annotation, and the dynamic and semantic nature of personal content metadata ontologies. In this paper we describe our empirical and usercentric approach into this issue. Based on our studies with mobile photo systems, we argue that consumer content metadata should be a side product of some other user activity like photo sharing or social discourse. To design user-centric metadata ontologies we need to understand both the uses people have for the media and the system design and implementation decisions that affect how and for what purposes the media is created.