PhotoMagnets: supporting flexible browsing and searching in photo collections

Abstract

People's activities around their photo collections are often highly dynamic and unstructured, such as casual browsing and searching or loosely structured storytelling. User interfaces to support such an exploratory behavior are a challenging research question. We explore ways to enhance the flexibility in dealing with photo collections and designed a system named PhotoMagnets. It uses a magnet metaphor in addition to more traditional interface elements in order to support a flexible combination of structured and unstructured photo browsing and searching. In an evaluation we received positive feedback especially on the flexibility provided by this approach.