It is often said that “a picture speaks a thousand words.” It may explain, at least in part, why so many people love to take and to share photographs. Even in the digital era, people love to share their photographs. The life of a digital photograph typically starts with an innocuous click of a camera. Thereafter, the digital photograph may be copied through several forms of digital media and sometimes even enriched using image editing software. At one or more stages in the life of the digital photograph, the photograph may be shared with a larger community, by means of emails, or other messaging mechanisms, or by means of an online photo-sharing service, or even by publishing the photographs on a webpage.
However, while a picture might “speak a thousand words,” subsequently building indices, or other mechanisms usable to search for a photograph on, such as a computer system, remains a daunting task. The bane of semantic gap coupled with a rapid increase in the number of shared digital photographs has made this problem of search an extremely challenging one. To bridge this semantic gap, several approaches have been developed that attempt to exploit information obtained during different stages of life of the photograph to aid in tagging the photograph. For example, some digital cameras may embed selected information about the photograph within EXIF and/or GPS metadata. Such techniques, however, are often limited in the type and/or amount of information that may be embedded. Similarly, personal photo management and editing software allow for annotations to be associated with the photograph, however, such actions often require substantial efforts by a user to apply such annotations. This often means that many photographs remain un-annotated by such tools. Still other approaches propose the public to view photographs and directly or indirectly provide tags to the photographs. Again, this activity remains very labor intensive, and subject to much disagreement by the viewers. In addition, such community efforts may not provide a sufficient personal identification to photographs. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.