Front-camera video recordings as emotion responses to mobile photos shared within close-knit groups

People use social-photography services to tell stories about themselves and to solicit responses from viewers. State of the-art services concentrate on textual comments, "Like" buttons, or similar means for viewers to give explicit feedback, but they overlook other, non-textual means. This paper investigates how emotion responses--as video clips captured by the front camera of a cell phone and used as tags for the individual photo viewed--can enhance photo-sharing experiences for close-knit groups. Our exploration was carried out with a mobile social-photography service called Social Camera. Four user groups (N=19) used the application for two to four weeks. The study's results support the value of using front-camera video recordings to glean emotion response. It supports lightweight phatic social interactions not possible with comments and "Like" buttons. Most users kept sharing emotion responses throughout the study. They typically shared the responses right after they saw a just taken photo received from a remote partner. They used the responses to share their current contexts with others just as much as to convey nuanced feelings about a photo. We discuss the implications for future design and research.