How do people manage their digital photographs?

Abstract

In this paper we present and discuss the findings of a study that investigated how people manage their collections of digital photographs. The six-month, 13-participant study included interviews, questionnaires, and analysis of usage statistics gathered from an instrumented digital photograph management tool called Shoebox.Alongside simple browsing features such as folders, thumbnails and timelines, Shoebox has some advanced multimedia features: contentbased image retrieval and speech recognition applied to voice annotations. Our results suggest that participants found their digital photos much easier to manage than their non-digital ones, but that this advantage was almost entirely due to the simple browsing features. The advanced features were not used very often and their perceived utility was low. These results should help to inform the design of improved tools for managing personal digital photographs.

An Examination of a Large Visual Lifelog

“…There has been much research recently on the organization of personal photo archives [3,4,5]. Some of this research aims to organize personal photo archives by exploiting the results of visual content analysis of the photo in order to extract some semantic meaning, with the goal of aiding the organization, search and retrieval of the photos.…”

Interaction Design for Personal Photo Management on a Mobile Device

“…Because the user selected only good photos for inclusion in a photo album, it was most likely to contain high quality or useful photos (Rodden, 1999). The major feature of an album is the grouping or organization into pages and the captioning, often appearing beside the chosen photos where the user adds a short description of the photo, often with a humorous comment.…”

“…Preservation, digital enhancement or novelty were more likely motives rather than as a true replacement of chemical photos. Sharing was possible by copying files onto a disk and passing it to somebody who also owned a PC or more recently sending the photos as an email attachment (Frohlich et al, 2002;Rodden & Wood, 2003), but the PC did not come to be used as a tool for photo management until people started taking photos with digital cameras.…”

Flux: Enhancing Photo Organization through Interaction and Automation

“…This task is throughout the literature commonly referred to as filing (e.g., [9]) and relies on several other actions: The user has to be able to somehow sift through his collection to get an overview of the content and find certain objects. A purely search-driven approach is not feasible within the highly visual domain of photos, because finding a photo using text is only possible with meaningful keywords that have to be manually added by the user, a task that is only reluctantly performed, if at all ( [10]). We therefore chose a browsing mechanism that lets the user quickly narrow in on a section of the collection and then linearly go through the contained photos.…”