PicFlic: Social discovery thru pictures

The ubiquity of smartphones is driving growth in the use of cameras as visual sensors of the things around us, and towards the sharing of `photos of things´ as a mechanism for the social discovery of physical things. The combination of this user trend with increasing support for device-to-device protocols has the potential to rejuvenate the space of proximity-based social applications. Enabling this future requires solutions to systems issues around creating effortless and efficient sharing of media across large collocated groups. This paper enumerates the platform and user experience challenges in creating such effortless, optimized and anonymity preserving experiences for proximity-based photo sharing, with social discovery as a key user benefit. It presents our efforts building PicFlic, a photo sharing system, based on these principles.