A personal perspective on photowork: implicit human–computer interaction for photo collection management

In the age of digital photography, the amount of photos we have in our personal collections has increased substantially along with the effort needed to manage these new, larger collections. This issue has already been addressed in various ways: from organization by meta-data analysis to image recognition and social network analysis. We introduce a new, more personal perspective on photowork that aims at understanding the user and his/her subjective relationship to the photos. It does so by means of implicit human–computer interaction, that is, by observing the user’s interaction with the photos. In order to study this interaction, we designed an experiment to see how people behave when manipulating photos on a tablet and how this implicitly conveyed information can be used to aid photo collection management.