Event Photos

Most of us have been to events where participants take photos, but what happens to them at the end of the event?

Recently while taking photos at an event I was good-naturedly hassled about pictures I'd taken at a previous event with the same attendees. I'd put the photos, taken in a semi-private space, up on flickr.

I love taking pictures at events, because it means I have a permanent visual record of the people and the places. It means that in 12 months when a participant emails me I can reacquaint myself with the face that matches the name and email address. It also gives me something to illustrate my blog with.

On reflection, I believed I could do better than just blatting all the images up publicly on flickr. After a little editorial work (i.e. throwing out the really bad ones), I uploaded them to flickr privately and emailed the participants of the event the URLs of the images they're in, to give them the option of veto. This works because flickr uses authorisation only for HTML pages, images' privacy is protected due to the obscurity of the URL. All but one participant got back to me and approved the images. I have no idea whether the remaining participant objected to their photos, didn't receive the email or just never got around to responding. Once I'd had the bulk of the responses I started to make the images public.

Now this was quite a bit of work. I had to: (a) write a form email; (b) track down everyone's email address; (c) match people to email address; (d) send off customised emails to everyone, (e) then track who respondedand (f) make public images that everyone had OK'd. But a bit more thought suggests that this could potentially be cut down hugely using an appropriate tool. In particular (a), (d) and (e) could be completely automated using a stateless tool and flickr. (b) and (c) would require a more sophisticated tool, with semantic web and/or image recognition capabilities, which put them in a different league.

How a tool might work:

1. The photographer uploads photos privately to a new set on flickr.
2. The photographer goes to the tool, which authenticates them with flickr, using the existing API.
3. The photographer selects a set of of photos to operate on.
4. The photographer selects a list of subjects. The easiest way to do this is probably have a text field into which the photographer can cut and paste an email header, since every event in the known universe is organised by email these days.
5. The tool presents the photographer with a table of photos (which the tool can access because it is authenticated) and people / email addresses, the photographer checks checkboxes as to which people are in which photos.
6. The tool adds tags to each photo to indicate who is in which photo and their email address. Ideally the tags would be encrypted, so as not to make the email addresses open to spam and to avoid tempting yahoo! to do something we'd prefer it didn't.
7. The tool presents the photographer with an email for customisation. The email contains a thumbnail of each photo the subject is in, and a URL to block or approve the particular photo, as well as URLs to blanket-block and blanket-approve all photos. The instructions in the email make it clear that the subject should reply to the email either approving or rejecting the photos, either as a block or individually. The instructions also make it clear what happens in the event that the subject does not respond.
8. The tool sends out each of the emails.
9. Subjects receive the emails, indicate their preferences, and return them.
10. When the photographer receives an email back from the subject, they click on the appropriate URLs, which access the tool, which amends the previously added metadata on the pictures. If any pictures have been cleared by all required subjects, it is automatically made public.
11. Optionally the tool might include a tiding-up feature which allows the photographer to visit after some fixed period of time and automatically deals with photos still public, by permanently deleting them, removing all metadata except that they were blocked, etc.

Such tool could also be used to add rich metadata in some appropriate metadata format (Dublin Core or FOAF anyone?). Such metadata could be approved (or rejected) by participants at the same time as photos.

cheers stuart