MediaGLOW: Organizing Photos in a Graph-based Workspace

Related comments:


Summary:
This short paper from IUI 2008 by Girgensohn, et al. presents MediaGLOW (Graph Layout Organizing Workspace), a photo-browsing system that groups user photos and displays them via a graph-based layout algorithm that places items in stacks and local neighborhoods.  MediaGLOW maintains a graph representing similarity distances between photos and photo stacks (nodes).  Similarity distances connect nodes like springs and assign weights as appropriate.  These distance values can be calculated in a number of ways - photo creation time, geographic location, and visual similarity.  Once the user groups photos into a stack, the stack is surrounded by a "neighborhood" of similar photos.  The neighborhoods are represented by "halos" that show up "hot" (red) or "cold" (blue) based on how strongly related they are.  


The authors conducted a user study of MediaGLOW in which participants were given 450 geo-tagged photos and asked to place them into five categories, then choose three photos from each category to place into a travelogue.  The overall results showed that traditional interfaces were more efficient for the task than MediaGLOW, but that MediaGLOW was more "fun" to use.


Discussion:
MediaGLOW does a good job of visually associating photos and seems like a fun way to navigate a photo library.  The problem with it (for me) is that the layout would get confusing and cluttered very quickly as the number of photos in the library increased.  When combined with some sort of touch interface, I think MediaGLOW could be a very powerful tool for photo browsing and organization.