A Story Authoring Tool with Mapped Photo Collections

Our research goal is to facilitate the sharing of stories with digital maps. The main technical novelty of this paper is a method for semi-automated creation of photo slideshows with geotagged photographs. Story authoring software like movie editors and slideshow editors enable us to create stories by arranging elements like movie clips, audio clips, photographs, etc. in the order of the storyline. Those software have functions of sorting the elements by using their time stamps. For example, we can sort photographs in time series in common slideshow editors. On the other hand, people don't arrange all the part of stories in time series. Our research target is a slideshow with geotagged photographs. According to our analysis on spatial and temporal relationships between every two successive frames of the slideshows, in average, over 20% of two frames are arranged not in time series but in “spatial series.” Spatial series means elements are arranged based on their spatial proximity or relationships. They make panoramic sequence, walkthrough sequence, etc, in slideshows. We therefore propose a method for sequencing photographs based on their temporal and also on spatial relationships. We have released a software for mapping personal photo collections and representing them as stories such as route guidances, sightseeing guidances, personal diaries, and so on. Each story is conveyed through a sequence of mapped photographs, presented as a synchronized animation of a map and an enhanced photo slideshow. We implemented the sorting function proposed in this paper on the software.