Finding the pain
I have a confession to make. I take a ton of photos.
From 1982 when I got married until about 1999 I took thousands of slides and prints (I have four children and dozens of extended family members.) Since 1999 I have been completely digital and taken thousands more. Most of our slides and prints are now scanned and I have over 15,000 digital photos — all synced to my iPad which has become a very fun family photo album.
In the last five years I have built a dozen slideshows for open houses, graduations, weddings, and anniversaries. Each of those slideshows turned out well, but required many hours of work. Scanning physical photos is a very labor intensive task, but fortunately I am close to 90% complete in that task.
I have tried many different photo organization methods over the years, but currently have a very simple method: I keep a separate folder for every slide tray, every print album, and every month of digital photos.
But, something that still takes much more time than I would like is finding the photos I want to include in a given slideshow.
I plan to build something to ease that pain point.
Past attempts to ease the pain
My first “major” slideshow was for my oldest daughter’s high school graduation and open house. We homeschooled our children, so this was a very personal and exciting time for us, and I wanted it to be special.
During that year I purchased a slide scanner, and she scanned in all our slides (from her birth in 1987 until my Pentax SuperME died in 1997), and select photos from the albums between my slides and digital camera era. By the time she was finished, we had over 10,000 photos to search through to produce the slideshow — a bit overwhelming.
I don’t remember exactly what software I tried during that time, but I know I looked at dozens and tried most of them at least a little. I do know that I could not find anything very useful for selecting the photos I wanted — so I did what any good hacker does, I rolled my own.
Through several iterations, I ended up with a simple Delphi application (once my favorite development environment!) that would allow her to quickly browse all those photos and identify all the ones where she appeared. It worked pretty well given it’s limitations, but by judicious use of workarounds and copying of directories, it helped us narrow the 10,000+ photos to around 3,000 that had her in them. We then used the same application to select out a subset of those 3,000 to produce a set of photos we wanted to use in the slideshow. I used slightly enhanced versions of that application and other simple methods for my oldest son’s graduation in 2007, second son in 2008, and youngest daughter in 2010.
For other slideshows I have used simple methods such as general file browsing using my MBP and copying the photos I wanted to a new directory. Not terribly difficult, but pretty time consuming.
What I really want
Until Google or someone develops image searching as good as the text web crawling available today, I do not think any completely automated method of finding photos will ever satisfy me. I would love to tag all my photos with names, events, places, etc., but even if facial recognition improves a great deal, doing so will remain an intensively manual process.
Now that I have an iPad with a copy of all my photos, it is amazing how quickly I can flow through photos and find individual photos I had forgotten about. I want to take that ease of browsing on my iPad and apply it to quickly select a set of photos that can then be turned into a slideshow.
My App idea
My target customer is someone who has thousands of digital photos, probably only loosely organized, and wants to select a subset of those photos for a slideshow or other display.
The initial requirements for my iPad app are:
- create a project that will hold the state and can be edited later,
- select photos from iPad albums,
- attach a playlist,
- play slideshow on iPad or through video out.
Current status
I first started mocking up something like this at the iPadDevCamp in San Jose last April. The purpose of iPadDevCamp was to show what could be done within the constraints of the existing platform, but since iOS 3.x does not allow access to to photo albums on the device, I shelved the idea. It has now been announced that iOS 4.2 will be available on the iPad, so my idea is viable again.
During iPadDevCamp, I came up with some screen ideas using iMockups that are my starting point this week. I shared those ideas with other developers there and received useful advice, and will take that into consideration as I develop some prototypes. I have talked with some local iPhone users about my idea, but not in detail, and none of them are iPad owners.
This week I began exploring the AssetsLibrary framework in the iPhone simulator, but will have to wait for a 4.2 beta SDK before I can play with the iPad simulator or device. Since I will need some photo sources in the meantime, I spent some time experimenting with other options, and decided to start with a simple ftp based photo loader for now.
What’s next
It is vital to find potential customers early so I can validate my ideas, but that will definitely be a challenge for me. I am reading through Steve Blank‘s book “The Four Steps to the Epiphany”, about his customer development process and even though it is probably geared towards multiple developer startups, it has given me some insight into how to begin.
Once I have a simple photo loader to simulate photo album access, I will begin prototyping various ideas. I have learned to treat my prototypes as disposable code so I can move quickly, hopefully I will stick to that.
My task list for this next week:
- Prototype methods for quickly browsing a set of photos,
- Begin building a customer development plan,
- Find at least one local iPad user with a decent collection of photos.
Tweets that mention Sunetos, Inc. :: A problem to solve -- Topsy.com | 12-Sep-10 at 2:47 pm | Permalink
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Alfred R. Baudisch | 12-Sep-10 at 3:06 pm | Permalink
I have the “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” book and I found it too complex, but I liked how you pointed it to this case, and I feel I should try to read it now
dwsjoquist | 12-Sep-10 at 3:48 pm | Permalink
I made it about half way through the Epiphany book last year, but it didn’t seem to apply to where I was at the time, so I just skimmed most of the rest.
Now that I’m a little more focused on a product idea, I’m re-skimming it, looking for what is useful.
I believe his customer development approach will be helpful. I think it ties in well with the MVP ideas (Minimal Viable Product) promoted by Eric Ries as well.
Ken Carpenter | 12-Sep-10 at 4:10 pm | Permalink
Hi Doug,
Have you looked into the Faces feature of iPhoto? If that metadata is accessible via code, you could take advantage of it to help users create slideshow “playlists”.
Some other ideas I’ll throw out there for your consideration:
1. Ability to quickly assign tags to photos by drag and drop or tapping a grid of keywords. Some default tags would exist initially such as “birthday”, “vacation”, “Christmas”, etc. Give the user the ability to quickly add new tags like “Doug”, “Ken”, “1997″, “Bahamas”, “Paris”, etc. to quickly categorize photos. Then you can create slideshows based on photos that match the metadata (e.g., select “birthday”, “Ken” to see all my birthday photos, or “birthday”, “Ken”, “1997″ to see all my birthday photos for 1997. Slideshows would auto-update as new images with the corresponding tags are added.
2. Create slideshows using photos stored on various online services such as Picasa and Flickr (no idea how hard this might be, but could be cool). Use their metadata tagging to help select photos.
3. Ability to select an iPod playlist to associate with the slideshow.
Good luck with the project!
Ken
dwsjoquist | 12-Sep-10 at 4:26 pm | Permalink
Ken,
I haven’t taken a look at iPhoto/Faces yet, but will be at some point. Right now I only have the freebie version. I really need to evaluate the regular version as a replacement for my simple directory storage method. I have a mild concern that Apple will eventually tackle something like this in the iOS iPhoto apps.
I would like my photo selection process to work across multiple photo streams eventually, but I’m trying to stay pretty focused with my initial version. If the app is useful at all, adding Flickr, Picasa, or other photo services seems like a great extension.
I need to experiment some more, but I believe that even though the photo albums are now accessible, they are read only to non-Apple apps, so tagging a photo album photo might not be possible. It’s a great idea though, and would work with other photo sources besides the on device albums
Thanks for the ideas, I appreciate you taking the time to share!
Doug
Tim | 13-Sep-10 at 10:44 am | Permalink
Doug,
Great idea. I wish you the best of luck with it.
I have around 34,000 photos in an iPhoto library, and use the faces feature, and more recently the places feature.
There are all sorts of “workflows” that I think could be done more easily (and enjoyably) on the iPad (or even iPhone) and have been hoping that apple will update the photo app on the ios devices so that it can be used more interactively.
For example, the faces feature in iPhoto (desktop) is great, but it requires you to confirm each person. It can be done pretty efficiently on the desktop, but I would love to be able to do this on the ipad.
Same for places – I take photos with both my iPhoto and point and shoot, and then use the “copy/paste location’ feature of iPhoto to update the non geotagged photos.
There are a number of other things I’d like to be able to do on the iPad, similar to creating a slideshow. One example is creating physical books, which can be done pretty easily on the desktop with iPhoto. Being able to weed out photos in preparation on the iPad would be great. This coiled be done with something as simple as tagging eg “book candidates” which could then be used back on the desktop.
I would definitely recommend you look more at iPhoto.
Please feel free to contact me – I am also a (part time) iOS developer, and so would be happy to provide feedback if/when you get to testing. I think your “concern” that Apple will add these features is well founded.
I can tell you as a potential customer, I would pay a decent chunk of change for an app that let’s me manage my photo collection from my iDevice.
Best
Tim
dwsjoquist | 13-Sep-10 at 11:20 am | Permalink
Tim,
I will be spending some quality time with iPhoto soon. One of the issues that I will be experimenting with down the road is pushing updates (tags, etc.) back out to whatever source the photos came from, including iPhoto. But since I’m working on this in addition to my full-time consulting work, that might not make the cut for version 1.
I’ll keep my blog updated with my progress. When I reach the point of having something for others to test, I will definitely involve more people, so thanks for the offer of feedback — I’m sure I will take advantage of it.
Thanks for taking the time to provide some very useful ideas!
Doug
Mark | 01-Nov-10 at 12:55 pm | Permalink
Doug – Hey it’s been awhile since I’ve checked on your blog. Your photo app sounds quite interesting. I am taking more-and-more photos with my DSLR and struggle with getting them tags, sorted, etc. on a regular basis. This may not be quite your apps purpose, but let me throw this at you. I would love to have some of the library sorting/filtering/tagging capabilities that Adobe Lightroom has in an iPad app. I would love to be able to load the photos into the app, then sift through them, throwing out the unusable ones, rating other on 1-5 stars and tagging with keywords (persons, places, events, etc.) to other other ones. Having some kind of sync capability with a desktop app would be important to me as I go back-and-forth between the portable and stationary worlds.
I do like the idea of taking existing photos and sifting through them to tag them for a particular album/collection and creating a somewhat adhoc slideshow from it (or a photobook or something else).
I think I just blew the scope off your photo app, but wanted to throw out my ideas for how a photo sorting app would be most useful to me.