The UPTO has granted Nokia a patent for using voice tags to ease the filing of camera phone pictures. Not only is Nokia the largest mobile phone and smartphone vendor in the world, it is also the biggest seller of digital cameras, as nearly all of the tens of millions of handsets it sells every year integrate them.

According to the patent, many mobile handsets store pictures in a single image folder - when it fills up another is automatically created - or in separate pre-defined folders, such as "vacation", "work", "friends" and "miscellaneous."

A user usually gets a chance to manually decide what to do with an image on their handsets through a series of menus accessible through their device's navigation controls. They can also choose to transfer the picture to a PC later on.

With Nokia's invention, once you take a picture you're given the opportunity to use a voice to tag to store the image in a particular folder or, if you decide, delete it.

Nokia gives the example of a user capturing an image of a sunset while on vacation. The picture would be displayed on the phone's screen for a set amount of time, whereupon it can receive a voice tag.

You would speak into the microphone and say the word "vacation" to store it in the "vacation" folder in the phone’s memory. If you would like it to appear in more than one folder, simply say another voice tag: "sunset" to move it into the "sunsets" folder, for example.

Previously, the user would have recorded voice tags, which match certain words and phrases to specific instructions. The word "vacation," in the above example, had already been associated with the "vacation" folder. So when "vacation" was spoken, the picture was moved into the vacation folder.

To view the full patent (found by mad4mobilephones) see here. It is not known when or even if Nokia will implement this technology.

Last year, the market research firm In-Stat said the camera phone market would soon peak before starting to decline; mostly because a lot of these handsets come up short when compared to today's digital cameras and they aren't very flexible in allowing folks to do what they want with their pictures.

Many phone manufacturers, carriers and image sharing sites are looking for ways to help users get those pictures taken with camera phones off their handsets, whether it is for sharing or storage.

Resolutions on high-end phones, at least, have gotten higher as megapixels have increased. Nokia's next-gen smartphone, the N95, the replacement for the N93 and new N93i, will feature a 5 megapixel sensor, for example. That’s up from 3 megapixels in the current models.

Also, sharing - not just through MMS, which is difficult and expensive to do with higher megapixel camera phones - is finally getting the attention it deserves. Yahoo's new Yahoo Go 2.0 application, introduced a week a go, features photo sharing through Yahoo property Flickr, for example. The software, which also includes e-mail, local search and maps, news, sports, finance, entertainment, and weather, will be available through a number of carriers worldwide and in partnership with manufacturers like Samsung, Motorola, RIM and 3 Group.

Another example is an application called Lifeblog 2.0 from Nokia. This software aims to make collecting, storing and sharing multimedia content easier.

Because LifeBlog is a blog, content is stored chronologically. The software also links information about location, time or calendar entries to photos taken with an NSeries smartphone - the most popular smartphone series worldwide. Snap a picture during a meeting or at a birthday party and that photo will be tagged with information about that event.