So one of my realizations is that the act of creation can be much more rewarding than the act of consumption. Taking a photo and editing it can stimulate the creative juices, but nowadays, it ends there. You post the photo or share it, and its consumption on someone’s feed. The photos that we take tell a story, and in the past, people would take pains to create physical albums to collect these stories. I wanted PhotoGather to be able to enable people to do something similar (in a digital domain), and scalable to the number of pictures/videos that we currently capture.
My starting point was to create an app that lets you group, ungroup, and reorder your photos. My photos are still generally in chronological order, but I group them into years, months and days. Within a day, I may group multiple images that are part of a single event. Or, I may choose to group multiple days’ photos together becuase they are part of the same trip. Sometimes I reorder photos because the dates are inconsistent. Sometimes I reorder the “outlier” pictures and group them together – perhaps to capture scenes from home in a particular month. This grouping and reodering personalizes the album curation. Organizing the photos according to my own process also makes it easier for me to find the pictures that I want when I come back to look for them later.
The one visual trick PhotoGather uses is to always “fit” a group of photos within a rectangle. You can take an arbitrary number of photos of different aspect ratios, hit the group button, and it will place them all within a single rectangle with no empty spaces. Sometimes, it may pack into a thin rectangle, sometimes, it may pack into a square, and sometimes it may pack into a wide rectangle. The algorithm chooses what it thinks is the best enclosing shape so that all of the images stay of similar relative size. We can then snapshot this collage and use it as a thumbnail for the whole group of photos. We can do this recursively. At each stage – days, months, years – I have a collection of thumbnails that I can combine to give me the thumbnail for the next higher level. This is what PhotoGather lets you create and navigate.