I’d love to have a complete scrapbook of all my vacations, but it’s too much work. That’s why I need a service that would create the scrapbook automatically, online. Here’s how it could work.
First, my digital camera should have GPS so it always knows where I am. When I download my photos, a Google map would pop up, and the photos would go into storage according to the points on the map where the pictures were taken, ordered by date. The map forms the backdrop for organizing the scrapbook.
Second, I would use a special credit card for all purchases on my vacation, from gas stations to hotels to restaurants. The special part is that the records of my purchases would feed into my automatic scrapbook software and coordinate it with the camera’s GPS data. That would be enough data for the scrapbook system to intelligently guess the name of the restaurant or attraction where I was at the time of the picture.
Third, the system needs face recognition software so it can label photos with at least the names of family and friends who appear in them. It doesn’t need to be 100% accurate, but it could give you a big head start.
Let’s say you take a picture of a family member standing in front of the hotel where you are staying. The GPS from your camera would provide the approximate location, and when the scrapbook system compared it to your credit card receipts, it would know you stayed at the hotel near those coordinates. Your digital photo would be automatically labeled “Bob at the Hilton in Cleveland, April 15, 2008.” And it would store those pictures at a labeled location on the Google map.
When the vacation is over, the scrapbook is 85% complete. You just have to check its assumptions and add/correct any descriptors you want.
You could run it as a slide show, with a little icon of a car traveling from location to location on the Google map, while the calendar date appears in the corner. When the icon reaches a destination from which there are photos, it displays them in a slide show. Optionally, the system could bring in pictures from other sources to beef up your scrapbook. For example, if you visited the Grand Canyon, it could bring in some stock pictures to round out your album. It could also capture a screen shot of the hotel or resort’s web site during the period you visited.
Google should invent this product.