Lost in Memories: Interacting With Photo Collections on PDAs

The authors developed two browsers to support large personal photo collections on PDAs. The first browser is based on a traditional, folder-based layout that utilizes either the user’s manually created organization structure, or a system-generated structure. The second browser uses a novel interface that is based on a vertical, zoom able timeline. This timeline browser does not require users to organize their photos, but instead, relies solely on system generated structure. The system creates a hierarchical structure of the user’s photos by applying time-based clustering to identify subsets of photos that are likely to be related. In a user experiment, the authors compared users’ searching and browsing performance across these browsers, using each user’s own photo collection.