Photography Exhibition Composer

Problem Statement

There are a lot of different tools that enable users to display their photo collections online. However, most of them are limited in some way or another. For example, while Omeka has a lot of metadata and organization features, its “Exhibition” feature isn’t flexible or user friendly. More approachable tools like Google Photos are also more focused on organizing one’s photos than displaying them.

Approach

We would design and implement a tool that would be focused on organizing photos into an “exhibition” that can then be displayed publicly on the Internet. The main design goals would be:

  • User friendliness: it should be usable without any technical knowledge.
  • Floating layout: instead of being forced into a grid, the photos should be freely arrangeable on the screen.
  • Dynamic: the users should be able to actually ‘design’ the exhibition by iterating inside the tool, not just use it to create an exhibition from an existing design.
  • Style minimalism: other than displaying borders and shadows, the window itself would not be excessively styled - photos would be the content.

Audience

Future CMS633 students; photography hobbyists and photo collectors who want to display their photos online in a more curated way

Skills Needed

Frontend programming (css, js) would probably take the most time; Graphics design would also be important but would probably take less time because of the focus on minimalism. Backend programming work would be limited to saving the exhibitions and making them visible publicly.