Metadata practices for consumer photos

The consumer photo market has seen a tremendous transformation from its traditional camera-based film process to digitally enhanced image files. In the long-promised and highly anticipated convergence of PCs and consumer electronics, consumer digital photos are clearly leading the way. We now routinely snap photos with our camera-equipped cell phones or their more serious 8- or 13-megapixel cousins, upload them to PCs or hosted Web sites, send them to friends and family over the Internet, or beam them around our homes to TVs and other devices. The next big chall enge, however, is to be able to effectively search, organize, and route these photos. That's where metadata comes in, and numerous metadata practices and standards are emerging for consumer photos. In fact, the role of metadata will become so vital as our personal digital photo repositories grow that metadata's value greatly will surpass that of the content. Jelena Tešić's article discusses these efforts and provides insight into the role of metadata and trends toward semantically indexing digital photo contents. © 2005 IEEE.