Social Metadata for Personal Photography

The increasing number of media creation devices is adding to the organization and media management problem for personal media. Content describing metadata is seen as the most prominent answer to this problem. However, current metadata standards have shortcomings when it comes to the domain of personal media. This is because the standards are designed for public and professional uses of media and in personal media some fundamental principles about public and professional media and metadata do not hold true. Based on our studies and literature on people’s photography habits we propose to use social information as a metadata resource for storing, retrieving, and enabling new applications. We argue that information on social activity around personal media is both important to the end-users and enables new kinds of applications for solving the personal media management problem, and that future work on personal media metadata should take into account the social information related to the media.