TripSnapz 2012

TripSnapz was a prototype of a product to generate engaging pictorial summary of a trip for sharing with others. Implemented in Java and tied into many external services using public APIs.

Travellers often want to share the experience of a trip with their friends and family. Personal photos is the typical medium for that, particularly with smart-phones, however, the ease of photographic today means that it is all to easy to unload hundreds of unorganized photos on friends. The result can be tedious and baffling. The goal of TripSnapz was to help friends become more engaged with the trip by helping with the process of selecting and organizing trip photos, and augment it with context to begin the process of story telling.

To create a TripSnapz trip a user would sign into Flickr or Facebook, choose a collection of photos, and then TripSnapz would group photos by day, select an appropriate number and mix of photos based on popularity markers such as comments and likes and location, and then enrich the resulting set by identifying the location of the photos to allow it to contextual information such as the weather for each day of the trip and details of the visited locations and sights. The resulting trip could then be shared with friends using FaceBook or by directly sharing a trip URL.

The aim was to provide an initial automating generated trip based on reasonable guidelines, and then allow the user to further customize the result by overriding photo selection, choosing addition context information, annotating photos with anecdotes, and so on.