RAAK

You must know a few. People that are always snapping pictures, trying to document almost everything they’re coming across. It’s not really Photography with a capital P, but it can be interesting.

Now Alex Valli has turned that kind of compulsive snapshot behaviour into an art form of life-logging.

Valli is an interaction designer with a passion for photography. In a recent Wired article he says that he has a Flickr page, but that he uses it to “tell stories, not show single images”.

And he’s using his technical abilities to take the act of telling visual stories to the extreme.

Because he was spending so much time on annotating and selecting his photos, he wanted to automate the process. So for a recent trip to Lanzarote, Valli created a smartphone app that auto-snapped a million images, hanging from his neck. He then created an algorithm that analyses photo features, ignores the crap shots and incorporates location data.

He’s since further developed the app, called it DeepVue, which is now available from the iTunes Store. And you can see some of his ‘My Life in Pictures’ experiments on the DeepVue site.