Photo Cube: An Automatic Management and Search for Photos Using Mobile Smartphones

Recently new mobile devices such as cellular phones, smart phones, and digital cameras are popularly used to take photos. By the virtue of these convenient instruments, we can take many photos easily, but we suffer from the difficulty of managing and searching photos due to their large volume. This paper develops a mobile application software, called Photo Cube, which automatically extracts various metadata for photos (e.g., date/time, place/address, weather, personal event, etc.) by taking advantage of sensors and networking functions embedded in mobile smart phones like Android phones or iPhones. The metadata can be used to manage and to search photos. Using this Photo Cube, users will be able to classify, store, manage, and search a large number of photos easily, without specifying any information but just clicking the shutter in a camera. The Photo Cube system was implemented on smart phones using Google's Android.