How Do People Organise Their Photographs?

Increasing use of digital cameraswill lead tomore people having large personal collections of digital photographs. The study described in this paper set out to gain some insight into how computer-based systems to help people organise these images might be designed. Firstly, taking inspiration from earlier work by others on the management of personal documents, we interviewed people about the ways in which they currently organise their physical photograph collections. Secondly, in an attempt to establish how information retrieval techniques could be of use in this application area, we also asked the interviewees for their opinions of a number of possible features of a computer-based system for organising and retrieving personal photographs.