Lost in memories: interacting with photo collections on PDAs

We developed two browsers to support large personal photo collections on PDAs. Our 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. Our second browser uses a novel interface that is based on a vertical, zoomable timeline. This timeline browser does not require users to organize their photos, but instead, relies solely on system-generated structure. Our 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, we compared users´ searching and browsing performance across these browsers, using each user´s own photo collection. Photo collection sizes varied between 500 and 3000 photographs. Our results show that our timeline browser is at least as effective for searching and browsing tasks as a traditional browser that requires users to manually organize their photos.