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: content-based 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.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
          Subjects: Evaluation/methodology

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.8 PERSONAL COMPUTING
      K.8.1 Application Packages

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
annotation, content-based image retrieval, digital photography, image browsing, personal photography