CLIAMS:-NA- ,TagSPECI:[001]
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
[002] The present invention relates generally to technologies for sharing digital content and more specifically to a method for collaboration between image-capturing devices to allow real-time collation and synchronization of recorded media. The present invention further relates to a software application and a service utility platform based on said method.

[003] BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
[004] Availability, integration and use of image-capturing devices in consumer electronics such as digital cameras, phones, laptops, tablet PCs, gaming consoles and so on has seen a tremendous increase in the recent years. Furthermore, a plurality of these devices are now commonly owned or under control of the population in majority irrespective of social, economic, age or other strata. As a result, the sheer volume of digital images being added to individual collections continues to increase very rapidly. As these collections grow ever larger, issues of storage, collation, organization and collaboration progress quickly to alarming levels. It would therefore be advantageous to have a single platform that efficiently addresses these needs and yet is universal in implementation and operability across multiple image-capturing systems without being overly complex to use and/or expensive to procure, install or operate.

[005] Seamless, prompt sharing of images and other content has become indispensable to the present age of social-media whereby it would not be false to relate existence of parallel virtual identities of the subscribers involved. Ranging from self-portraits to images of nature, pets, work environments, social events and many more, the instances whereupon technology allows real-world visuals to be propagated into the virtual world or earmarked for records is limitless. A utility to enable sharing of digital content and capable of discerning between private / public sharing and containing configurable rules of collaboration is therefore an acute need of the art. Being able to network communicatively with other image-capturing devices would be a critical function to facilitate coordination and collaboration for compiling a meaningful image album in real time.

[006] Prior art, to the limited extent surveyed, bears mention to some attempts at meeting the needs listed hereinabove. For example, there exist many web-based social networking applications, FTP servers and websites that allow sharing of digital content. Alternatively, a user may choose to share images by sharing on physical media such as CDs, USB drives or electronically via email / uploading the images to a common social media server and then inviting others to view the images online. However, none of these methodologies offer real-time, non-intrusive interactions and configurable collaboration features, thereby keeping alive the reasons to invent for the present inventor, who therefore, as result of his targeted research, has come up with a novel solution for addressing the above-referred and other needs of the art once and for all.

[007] A better understanding of the objects, advantages, features, properties and relationships of the present invention will be obtained from the following narration which sets forth an illustrative preferred embodiment indicative of the various ways in which the principles of the invention may be embodied.

[008] BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION
[009] Principally, general purpose of the present invention is to assess disabilities and shortcomings inherent to known systems comprising state of the art and develop new systems incorporating all available advantages of known art and none of its disadvantages. Accordingly, the disclosure herein is directed towards a configurable utility for sharing of images captured using portable devices including cameras, mobile phones, tablets and their equivalents. Achievement of this and other objectives is described briefly herein under.

[010] Principally, the present invention sets out to achieve convenience and simplicity in collation of digital content from multiple people forming a neighborhood whilst generation of said digital content for real-time sharing, saving, archiving and/or compiling for viewing among the mentioned participants or other people. Another object of the present invention is to constitute a virtual storage of said content being therefore not bound by real-world limits of storage space or display resolution / size inherent to the image-capturing devices themselves.

[011] While the invention proposed herein allows real-time sharing and/or online storage of digital content, these compilations are not always free to access for all. Access control via configurable filters and locks is intended to be integrated for setting out roles such as owner of album, administrator, moderator and subscriber / group member. Optionally, sharing may be restricted in a closed group with attributes conventionally associated with digital rights management modules including silencing of copy, alter and delete commands.

[012] According to one aspect of the present invention, the images, upon capture, are routed to a remote server through wireless communications integrating internet / WiFi technologies and their equivalents and combinations. This effectively prevents consumption of onboard storage capacities of the image-capture devices themselves and also provides for intervention by sub-utilities for renaming, sizing and archiving of images as per configuration selected by the user.

[013] According to another aspect of the present invention, the aforementioned methodology is embodied in a service platform wherein each of the users has a subscriber account to which content from his/her device may be uploaded and shared with selected users and/or made public for all the collection’s participants. The user may view, select, alter, sequence and perform other actions via a user interface provided by the service platform.

[014] According to yet another aspect of the present invention, the aforementioned utility includes a programmable function allowing the user to set a predetermined event, such as circumscribing time limits, to allow automatic routing of images captured by multiple users into a common virtual location and optionally its real-time sharing with a closed group / general public. This aspect may be achieved as a predefined calendar event or filter applied to already saved images, therefore preventing labor of manually retrieving images, sending access links for viewing images and other tiresome processes associated with conventional image sharing applications.

[015] During implementation of the present invention, and in particular the service utility platform proposed herein, the user, at outset, is greeted by a home screen which shows all the image collections the user is involved in. From the foregoing narration, it will be clear that the image collections shall be either ones created by the user himself / herself and/or ones created by others and to which the user is invited as a participant – in former case, the user shall have control/access privileges that of an administrator while in the latter case his/her rights shall be limited to that set by corresponding administrator of the image collection concerned. On a generic note, the administrators may create, name, modify, download, assign chronometric (start/end), conditional access hierarchy protocols and other attributes/filters to their image collections while other people may generally have the options to accept participation to an image collection and download permitted content. Access/modification/download and other privileges may be changed by the administrator at any point of time, which may be reflected suitably to notice of the user as annotations to the images and/or properties of images comprising the image collection.

[016] Another distinct feature provided herein is that creation and/or participation to an image collection can be scheduled irrespective of the time of the event itself of which images are to be collated – meaning that the user may create / accept participation to an image collection anytime but consequentially, the images from his and other’s image capturing devices may be collected as soon as the image sharing is initiated. Attributes of raw image data, location and so on will comprise filters for archiving and organization of the images in the resultant image collection. The user, meaning in that a creator and/or any other person invited to an image collection, may, at his choice, select among images on-board his device to be shared to the image collection.

[017] From the disclosures of this document, the utility and applicability of the present invention can be readily appreciated for direct application to sharing of captured images. It shall be understood here that the present invention is not limited in application to images and that its principles may be applied in essence to other important applications irrespective of specifications of digital content, file formats and usage environments.

[018] There has thus been outlined, rather broadly, the more important features of the invention in order that the overall color of the present invention may be better understood, and additionally, in order that the present contribution to the art may be better appreciated. There are additional features of the invention that will be described in the complete specification to be submitted hereinafter and which will form the subject matter of the patent claims intended