Using large personal photo collections for reminiscing and autobiographical reflecting

Personal photos are a great link to autobiographical memories, but navigating through a large collection while simultaniously grasping all of its content is challenging. I present the concept of a scroll-driven navigation that links photos with temporal and spatial metadata. Location and date are visualised and shown juxtaposed to the photo content.

The design and prototype I present contains only basic functionality. Based on this, more advanced implementations are possible and desirable. The next step would be the testing of various real photo sets from different author types to proof and refine the design.

Screencast of interactive prototype showing all the functionality: Scrolling through the date timeline, seeing how the map updates accordingly, and changing the photo views from overview to few.

Overview of photos taken between June and September 2014. Note how the days are highlighted in the timeline. You can tell by the map that the photos were all taken in Germany.

Overview of photos from trip to the Scottish highlands in May 2015. Note how you can get a sense of the route that was taken by looking at the map.

Grid view of photos taken on a trip through Iverness.

Cover of my printed thesis.

Thousands of my photos sorted by hue. This was quite random actually.