Picture Penguin: A Multi-Faceted Mobile Photo Navigation System

Abstract

Multi-faceted data, such as a photo’s location, timestamp, and content, are difficult to navigate, particularly when a user hasa joint search and interactive exploration task. This task is even more difficult to accomplish when confined to a small mobile display.In this paper we present Picture Penguin, a novel personal photo navigation system that enables search and filtering through linked and combined views of temporal, geo-spatial and contextual information using timeline, maps, gallery and tree maps. Spatial andnon-spatial data are linked in a seamless and coherent manner in a hybrid timeline and map. Together, these features promote efficientphoto finding, even without complete knowledge of the information, such as when the date of a photo is unknown. Picture Penguinscales to large photo collections and reduces complexity through clustering and data summarization techniques, and runs as both amobile and a desktop application. Photo navigation goals, platform requirements and a task taxonomy were generated through theanalysis of user interviews and surveys in order to inform the design of the system.Motivated by the photo navigation tasks, we also present an extended search task taxonomywhich introduces the concept of a spectrum of location and target specificity rather than binary knowledge.