Pixelsior: Photo Management as a Platform Service for Mobile Apps

Photo management has become a sizable fraction of our computer interaction. Due to economic incentives, every software company wants to restrict users to using their software for photo management and use. Unfortunately, this results in duplication of images, repeated image manipulation operations, and an overall uneven and siloed user experience. In this paper, we motivate the need for a dedicated platform service for photo management which can not only manage the photos on one device, but also transparently manage content adaptation, image manipulation and propagation of the manipulation to all the applications on a device, and all devices using the service. Pixelsior presents our study of the requirements of such a system as well as a preliminary design motivated by requirements of consistency and efficiency.