Personalized image collages, clothing, albums and other image enhanced items are becoming increasingly more accessible as digital printing technologies improve. However, as personalized image bearing products have become more accessible, consumers have become more discriminating. In particular, consumers now seek methods and systems that produce customized image products in a more convenient, faster, seamless, automatic, and integrated manner. While becoming somewhat more common, many items for displaying and/or including embedded customized images are still considered novelties. Methods for recognizing image contents that fulfill a predescribed aesthetic appearance often fall short of expectations. For example, many products with customizable embedded images include photos of people. For this type of product, it would be desirable to identify images that satisfy preselected artistic criteria and/or image attributes, such as number of persons pictured, who is pictured, what zoom ratio, temporal aspects, clothing, background, season, facial expressions, hue, colorfulness, texture, and sharpness, etc. Because some artistic aesthetic elements work better for certain product formats, it would also be desirable if multiple image attributes including aesthetic criteria could be evaluated in parallel for a number of images, and the images with the highest fitness score be automatically determined by computer algorithm. Furthermore, customer satisfaction can be improved if the customer can select a favorite image, or several favorite images, to be included in an image enhanced product. Attributes from this favorite image can be extracted in real time from the image itself, read from a file associated with the image, such as a metadata file, a DPOF file, or a file stored by a user, or it can be generated in some other fashion, or even input directly by a user, and then be used in coordinating surrounding image and template contents. Conversely, attributes of a selected image product template can be used in coordinating which image or images from a user collection can be placed within the template. Furthermore, attributes of a context or of an environment where the image will be displayed can be input to a computer system and referenced to select appropriate templates and images, or any combination of these algorithms can be integrated in a computing system or method.
The problem in the prior art is the time consuming process requiring users to manually search through many images and compose their own artistic creations, for which they may not be capable.