I HAVE DISCOVERED a clever way to automatically tag and organize photos with OneDrive. The cleverness starts with a leading image containing block capital letters. Let me explain.
Photo of kids on a pig by @topgold.
Like many other people, I let all of our handsets (Apple 5C, Lumia 1020 and Xperia Z3) automatically upload photos to OneDrive. When starting a new day's activities, I often print capital letters on a hand-made clapperboard, citing the venue or activity name on the clapperboard. Most of the time, my hand-printed letters are discoverable when I search OneDrive for them five minutes after I upload them.
These text searches work very efficiently when conducted on the OneDrive apps of our Android, Apple and Windows devices. My searches quickly return a single thumbnail image. By looking at the date or place of the image, I can ask OneDrive follow-up questions or simply tap into the cloud storage and flick through the thumbnails related to the places or times of the primary image.
In the case of the photo accompanying this blog post, I asked OneDrive to show me where Visa was accepted. The OCR in OneDrive had recorded the Visa logo behind the children sitting on the pig.
I expect to be able to use OneDrive's search features for a variety of data mining tasks, including text, date, place and people searches. And I don't expect to have to label images since machine intelligence will perform these tasks more efficiently.
[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative workflows in the Limerick School of Art & Design.]
