Mobile Photography within a Social Context: Take my snapshot and get to know my friends with PhotoFOAF

Abstract

Mobile digital photography has become a ubiquitous service: nearly every mobile phone is equipped with a camera. Huge collections of pictures are created with these phones that are hard to structure in a usable way. Problems in saving, managing and exchanging digital pictures are becoming typical obstacles that need to be tackled in order to have a usable system. We present PhotoFOAF: a new approach to mobile imaging that exploits the social context of a picture as an important part of the metadata. We present an approach that allows users to insert social metadata in pictures while capturing them. The resulting collections of captured pictures can be managed, searched and exchanged more easily by taking benefit of the personal social relevance of a picture. PhotoFOAF implements an end-to-end process to accomplish this and it exploits, enhances and stimulates social relationships between users during all the different steps.