Final Results
PhotoLife
Advisor: Amy Csizmar Dalal
Background
The old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” may be true, but pictures also contain a wealth of information in the form of metadata.
Metadata about images goes beyond the filename and the tags. It can also contain the date and time, the location, the file size, the type of camera used, and other information about the camera. For example, here is one of the pictures on my phone's camera roll, and its associated metadata.
Metadata can be used for various purposes. Photo libraries can group photos by location and date into albums. Apps like On This Day and Timehop filter photos by the current month and day to show what pictures you've taken on this date in other years. Social media can show you all the photos you've been tagged in. And so on. In this project, we'll explore other potential uses for this data.
The project
The goal of this project is to extract metadata from photos (and possibly other types of media), and use this metadata to form a profile of the photographer and/or the subject. Profiles could include any of the following:
- Use location data to create a “heat map” of photo locations, either associated with a particular photographer or with some other (public) collection of photos.
- Use time of day data to create a "heat map" of times at which photos are taken. This could be particularly interesting to examine for popular landmarks -- e.g., the Eiffel Tower -- or for individual photographers.
- Auto-create photo albums based around a time period, a location, etc.
- Find all pictures with a particular tag (e.g. Eiffel Tower), and use the metadata to draw conclusions about how this subject is photographed. For instance: what's the most popular camera type used to photograph the Eiffel Tower?
In addition, there are ethical issues surrounding how we use metadata to draw conclusions and/or make predictions about the behavior of any given photographer or set of photographers. A key part of this project involves examining and analyzing ethical uses of photo metadata, and developing a set of guidelines / use cases around the use of metatdata for profile building.
Deliverables
- Code to extract, clean up, curate, and analyze photo metadata, and build a profile from this metadata.
- One or more profiles constructed from this metadata.
- A set of use cases (or guidelines) indicating ethical uses and limitations of your profile builder.
Recommended experience
No specific experience beyond Software Design and an interest in wrangling data from diverse sources and wrestling with ethical questions is required.
References/inspiration
To be added later.