Social album: Linking and merging online albums based on social relationship

This work designs a novel prototype system, Social Album, by utilizing social relationship data to link and merge online albums of individuals together. Field study results indicate that "co-event" albums related to more than one participating individual are the majority of online albums. Two different views are designed based on feedbacks from the interviews: the indexing view provides a metro-map such as an overview of the linked albums, while the browsing view allows individuals to peruse photos without looking at mis-aligned and duplicate photos from merged albums. Hence, through our system, Social Album, to share and gather "co-event" photos becomes much easier than before, and to browse the photos in the "co-event" albums also becomes more efficient while still keeping the comprehensiveness of the whole event. Finally, a user study demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed system.