Flux: Enhancing photo organization through interaction and automation

Abstract

In Flux, an application for digital photo collections, we provide methods for organizing and sharing photos in a convenient manner based on real-world physical interaction on a tabletop system. Additionally, the system supports four different orders based on quality, time, similarity and a combination of the latter two. The problem of scalability, which is especially relevant for a real-world sized photo collection is tackled with a combination of manual hierarchical clustering by the user and the automatic construction of "piles" of similar photos (depending on the currently active order) by the system. In this paper, we present the design goals, the visualization and interaction techniques deployed in Flux. ©Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.