An Active Browser for Personal Photo Collections

The size of personal photo-collections has been increasing exponentially due to recent technological advances in camera industry. The current photo-browsers act more as passive querying interfaces where the users can search for their photos and view them. This model relying on human memory to view photos does not work well in the case of large photocollections and many photos, in-turn significant photographs tend to get lost with time. In this paper, we propose the idea of an active photo browser which makes photo-suggestions which could either be picked at random from users’ personal collections or related to the current photo being viewed or related to the user’s current setting. We first conduct a user survey to identify the need for such a tool and then run a user studies with a prototype photo-browsing tool to get feedback and to understand the users’ mental model of connections between the photos. The knowledge of mental model will allow the photo-browser to make more relevant photosuggestions in the future. Author