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The diversity of photo products has grown more than ever before. A group of photos are not only printed
individually, but also can be arranged in specific order to tell a story, such as in a photo book, a calendar or a
poster collage. Similar to making a traditional scrapbook, digital photo book tools allow the user to choose a
book style/theme, layouts of pages, backgrounds and the way the pictures are arranged. This process is often
time consuming to users, given the number of images and the choices of layout/background combinations. In this
paper, we developed a system to automatically generate photo books with only a few initial selections required.
The system utilizes time stamps, color indices, orientations and other image properties to best fit pictures into
a final photo book. The common way of telling a story is to lay the pictures out in chronological order. If the
pictures are proximate in time, they will coincide with each other and are often logically related. The pictures
are naturally clustered along a time line. Breaks between clusters can be used as a guide to separate pages or
spreads, thus, pictures that are logically related can stay close on the same page or spread. When people are
making a photo book, it is helpful to start with chronologically grouped images, but time alone wont be enough
to complete the process. Each page is limited by the number of layouts available. Many aesthetic rules also
apply, such as, emphasis of preferred pictures, consistency of local image density throughout the whole book,
matching a background to the content of the images, and the variety of adjacent page layouts. We developed an
algorithm to group images onto pages under the constraints of aesthetic rules. We also apply content analysis
based on the color and blurriness of each picture, to match backgrounds and to adjust page layouts. Some
of our aesthetic rules are fixed and given by designers. Other aesthetic rules are statistic models trained by
using customer photo book samples. We evaluate our algorithm with test photo sets, and ask participants both
quantitative and qualitative questions for feedback. We have seen the improvement on the time it takes users to
produce a photo book and on the satisfaction with the overall quality.
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