My Pictures: informal image collections

digital photography, consumer, organising Digital techniques are rapidly becoming popular for the recording of images, but current applications for handling image collections still lag behind the varied and fluent ways of interacting that traditional informal collections offer. Here we report a field study of how home users use traditional ways of storing and organising their private photo collections. We compare this to the possibilities and limitations of current tools for digital image collections. Findings indicate that the interfaces of current digital tools provide excellent support for solution oriented indexing, but limited support for browsing and storytelling. Finally, we present an interface which combines the best of both worlds for interacting with digital images.