MediAssist: Managing personal digital photo archives

Recent years have seen a revolution in photography with a move away from analog film towards digital technologies. Many users of digital cameras are now accumulating very large numbers of personal digital photos. While digital storage offers ample capacity to store these collections, technology for managing digital photos has not kept pace with advances in capture and storage technologies. The MediAssist project at the Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP) at Dublin City University is developing applications to enable users to efficiently search their image archives.Users often remember where and when a photo was taken, and indeed may recall this more clearly than the actual contents of a photo, so clearly context information of this type should be effective when searching digital photo archives. MediAssist applications use the capture and exploitation of context data as the basis for organising and searching personal photo collections. The time and date of photo capture are easily accessible from the camera, and this can be augmented with location information using coincident GPS data.