Re: Photo grouping heuristic by time

[Dan Farina <drfarina berkeley edu>]

On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 08:42 -0500, John Russell wrote:
> On 12/3/05, Bengt Thuree <bengt thuree com> wrote:
> > On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 13:09 +0100, Jakub Steiner wrote:
> > > On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 01:38 -0800, Dan Farina wrote:
> > >
> > > > I was told a few weeks back after I had written this that in fact Apple
> > > > implemented something functionally similar, which they call "stacking"
> > > > in some product of theirs, which made me sad that I was no longer
> > > > unique, but the price of my code is right ;).
> > >
> 
> That sounds really cool.  Do you have a screenshot anywhere that shows
> how it is implemented?

No, but I could easily make some, if you want. Although I have primarily
been co-developing it with a member of the team who has a lot of
pictures (ironically, I collect none) and he says it's about "100x
cooler" to run it on your own pictures, mostly because when I run it on
other people's pictures it's hard for me to necessarily say what
happened close together or not. I do see some similar scenery, but
that's not always the case (eg, outside a museum, and then inside a
museum look very different to me but may make sense to whoever took the
picture to have those in one group)

What would you like to see in particular? I also didn't just shore up
the code right away because I'm not sure if there's an obvious UI
element in F-spot today to plug it in to.  Otherwise I would have been
delighted to have written a complete patch myself. (That and it could
use a bit of cleanup. I'm growing near finals as well, which terminate
on the 20th.)

But the good news is the interface with the GUI is quite thin.

It tells me:
 - what grouping level the user wants (eg, from the slider bar)
 - what group limit you have (eg, no more than 100)
    - This algorithm also knows how to combine groups to achieve this.
    - It is also optional, but defaults to Int32.MAXVALUE
 - what pictures (passes me an array of pictures w/dates)

I provide:
 - a sorted array of group objects, analogous to a Picture[][]

df