Taking the Tags with You: Digital Photograph Provenance

Prior to digital photography, the back of the glossy photo paper served as the canvas to write the important photo details. The photos were then transferred to a series of photo albums. The general public creates too many pictures to sustain the physical photo album. One byproduct of taking digital photos is the automatic number scheme embedded in the digital device. The semantic context of any photo can not be represented with this automatic labeling method. Hence, the user is responsible for concisely renaming the digital images. The rise of digital pictures creates a need for more reliant on storage technology for longevity. We present a suite of annotation tags that capture provenance details. We classify consumer photography provenance in terms of photo manipulation, photo clustering and photo semantics.