Reveal: Investigating Proactive Location-Based Reminiscing with Personal Digital Photo Repositories

Abstract

Recording experiences and memories is an important role for digital photography, with smartphone cameras leading to individuals taking increasing numbers of pictures of everyday experiences. Increasingly, these are automatically stored in personal, cloud-backed, photo repositories. However, such experiences can be forgotten quickly, with images 'lost' within the user's library, loosing their role in supporting reminiscing. We investigate how users might be provoked to view these images and the benefits they bring through the development and evaluation of a proactive, location-based reminiscing tool, called Reveal. We outline how a location-based approach allowed participants to reflect more widely on their photo practice, and the potential of such reminiscing tools to support effective management and curation of individual's increasingly large personal photo collections.