Thanks to advances in imaging technologies, people take more pictures than ever before. Further, the proliferation of media sharing applications has increased the demand for picture sharing to a greater degree than ever before. Yet the flood of photos, and the need to sort through them to find relevant pictures, has actually increased the time and effort required for sharing pictures. As a result, it is often the case that either pictures that are less than representative of the best pictures, or no pictures at all, end up getting shared.
Most people have many pictures or videos that include different people (or other entities) including family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. In many cases, not all entities are treated equally when deciding the importance of image. For example, images that show family and friends are typically treated as more important than images that show mostly strangers or the like. But sorting through today's large number of images to select the more important ones can be prohibitively time-consuming.