Capture, Annotate, Browse, Find, Share: Novel Interfaces for Personal Photo Management

The vision of ubiquitous digital photos has arrived. Yet, despite their broad popularity, significant shortfalls remain in the tools used to manage them. We believe that with a bit more creativity and effort, the photo industry can solve many of these problems, offering tools which better support accurate, rapid, and safe shared annotations with comfortable and efficient browsing and search. In this article, we review a number of projects of ours and others which relate to Ben Shneiderman’s work on interfaces for photo management. With these, we describe the problems that we see in existing tools and our vision for improving them.