Supporting personal photo storytelling for social albums.

Information overload is one of today's major concerns. As high-resolution digital cameras become increasingly pervasive, unprecedented amounts of social media are being uploaded to online social networks on a daily basis. In order to support users on selecting the best photos to create an online photo album, attention has been devoted to the development of automatic approaches for photo storytelling. In this paper, we present a novel photo collection summarization system that learns some of the users' social context by analyzing their online photo albums, and includes storytelling principles and face and image aesthetic ranking in order to assist users in creating new photo albums to be shared online. In an in-depth user study conducted with 12 subjects, the proposed system was validated as a first step in the photo album creation process, helping users reduce workload to accomplish such a task. Our findings suggest that a human audio/video professional with cinematographic skills does not perform better than our proposed system.