January 3, 2012
[This post is part of our ongoing series introducing Photosmith 2.0]
The Problem with Events
Most photo apps, and the iPad itself, group your photos in one of two ways: either fixed batches according to what you selected during import or “Events” which are nothing but groups by calendar date. But photos are rarely grouped like that, sometimes it’s a quick burst, sometimes a deliberate long series, sometimes they’re stand-alone “found moments”, but usually, they’re part of a larger set of photos too (by client/sitting, trip, wedding, etc.). In the context of these changing timeframes, “Event” groups have problems:
- Import-based Events force you to pick the groups during import. Sometimes even forcing you to do multiple manual imports from the same card just to control them
- Once you import, the grouping is set, there’s no ability to change it dynamically
- Events require you to do the sorting and on iPad you don’t even have metadata to help you make the selections
Real life scenario
Now take a step back for a second and let’s think about how most people take pictures. Let’s say you take a vacation to San Fransisco. You may take some pictures all along the trip:
- On the first day, you shoot some pics of interesting architecture and people in the airport on the way there
- The second day, when you arrive, you walk around the city, taking pictures of the buildings, the streets and cafes, etc – city life
- The third day, you walk down the Fisherman’s Warf area, take a tour of Alcatraz, and make a stop at Boudin Bakery for lunch. You spend a while at each of these – you came to get some good pictures, so you take your time to get some good shots.
- The fourth day, you head out of the city to the Napa Valley and visit some wineries. You have thing for fields of grapevines, so spend a whole day taking nothing but pics of grapevines.
- The last day you take it easy with the picture taking and then head back home
When you get back home you may have thousands of photos to go through. Unless you’re a stellar photographer, most of those will be throwaways, but it’s still useful to have some kind of grouping so you can go through them easier.
Most programs will divide photos into dates. That’s kinda useful, but this is a tablet and we wanted something more… hands on. So we invented Smart Groups.
From your trip you may have 100 shots from day 1, 200 from day 2, etc. So let’s make this one possible group – by the day. This is the same thing that Lightroom, the iPad, and just about everyone else gives you. But 200 pics is still a lot to go through.
… Let’s get more fine-grained: On your third day, you visited Fisherman’s Warf, Alcatraz, and ate at the Boudin Bakery. We could group these photos together so you’re only looking at a a couple of dozen photos at a time.
… Keep going: While you were at Alcatraz, you took pictures at the dock, of the mess hall, of the prison cells, and of the factory. There’s four more groups. Now you’re only sifting through a handful of pics.
… And we can keep getting more and more fine grained: You may have taken several pictures of one prison cell, and then several pictures of another set of cells because the lighting was different.
Introducing Smart Groups
Imagine being able to group by any of these scenarios, at any time, instantly, just by moving a slider. And with a single tap, you can select all or none of the images in that group. That’s Smart Groups. And that’s what you see above – a slider at the top of the Grid view, allowing you to easily change from your groups based on your current needs. The slider goes from a large, single group with all photos in your collection down to granular groups with just a couple images each.
Let’s say you’re a wedding photographer. You’re shooting a wedding, but you may take a group of pictures of the bride before the ceremony, some of the groomsmen, the ceremony itself, the cake cutting, etc, etc – all “mini events” unto themselves. With Smart Groups just slide your finger and change the grouping as you’re watching it.
The other integrated feature is adding the smart groups directly into the grid view. No need to create collections for minor operations (although you still can, if you’d like). Click on the image below for a larger version. Each header shows the date range of the images contained. Use the button on the left to select all or none of the images within that smart group. Need to include more from those related images, simply move the smart group slider and select all/none again.
As an aside, note that we’re still polishing the look/feel of everything. As with all these 2.0 posts, the images you see are still “beta” and should not be considered final versions.
We’re really, really excited about Smart Groups –after you’ve played with it once it’s hard to go back to any other way– day I say “revolutionary?” and I’ll be the first to say that companies really over-use that word…
The Smart Groups functionality is patent pending.
Posted in: Current Progress | 9 Comments
[...] Smart Groups [...]
More of this please!
That’s really friggin’ cool. That’s the kind of thing you would expect Apple to unveil as a new iPhoto feature during a keynote.
It sounds very similar to the automatic group into stack that lightroom has.
Don’t get me wrong, it sounds like a useful feature, but I wouldn’t call it revolutionary.
I had to go check the auto-stack feature in LR to be sure, I hadn’t used it in so long. If it’s the wheel, Smart Group is a car by comparison. We are doing so much more and it’s all visual and real-time. The biggest difference I see is that LR’s feature is primarily aimed at grouping burst shots. Ours is designed to group shots that you took during the same period. It may sound like a subtle (or no) difference but when it comes time to tag & keyword the productivity difference is huge. Also, stacks are either open taking up all of the space they do without stacks at all or closed in which case you can’t see the other photos or even select them. Smart Groups is all about making it easy to see your photos together and work with them in groups. They are very different tools for different reasons. Although, I will give you the grouping by time element is a similar thread.
Oh yeah, I forgot one more very important difference. LR is using a fixed time value that you set with a slider and have to tweak until you get what you want. We are applying heuristics to your images and figuring out where the breaks should be “magically”.
Yes, I use “magic” euphemistically here
What a great feature. Bring on 2.0!
Really looking forward to this!
Wow, sounds really cool! This combined with multitagging (:p) will revolutionise the usefulness of Photosmith.
Have you looked into patenting this idea? I hope so, you need to stop the competition taking this unique selling point you’ve created!