15 September 2008

Nokia filed a patent on a technique which
let users to scribble notes onto digital photos?!

One of the most irritating things about the cameraphone, actually about the all point-and-shoot digital cameras is the usually useless filenames they're given.

Of course, digital cameras save photos with EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) data but it only stores information are like the shutter speed, date and time, focal length, exposure compensation, metering pattern and if a flash was used and the only really useful info for average user is the geotagging information.

The rest of the info is only helpful for the experts to compare successful photos to those that are not because exif data provides insight about how camera settings affect photo characteristics such as exposure, depth-of-field and subject movement.

To solve this annoying problem Nokia has filed a new patent last week which should help us to classify our photos by scribbling the 'back-of-photo'!These scrabbled details will be useful to identifying what and who is in our digital photos.

It s actually some kind of digital equivalent of scribbling on the little white part at the bottom of a Polaroid photos but it virtually writes on the back of the photos and when photo is flipped over a user will have the option to describe photo with text entered on the keypad, and the text will be permanently incorporated into the image file in the similar way as EXIF data I guess.

Nokia GPS equipped camera phones are already able to geo tag photos and if Nokia will extend this geo data the back photo scrabbling we’ll have almost the perfect solution to keeping track about our photos.