With the expansion of digital photographic content stored online and concurrent proliferation of capturing devices, the management and visualization of personal photo collections have become very challenging tasks. In order to gain insight into novel ways of handling and representing large personal photo collections, this paper presents results of a user experience study into novel visualizations of multiple photo streams, sourced from different individuals or capture devices. A web-based application prototype was designed and implemented offering synchronized visualization of photo streams in a single- or multi-window display layout. An experimental study was conducted with 20 users, and the results demonstrate high user demand for concurrent presentation of multiple media streams as well as recommends methods for leveraging its potential.
Alt-HCI 2012 
This paper is mainly on a very interesting application of photo streaming that relates to behavioural study of users when they are using photo album collections on different platforms. I would like two parts of the paper which are the survey on state-of-the-art researches and experimental results for 20 users that is similar to the DRT test in speech recognition applications.
Posted by H. Peyvandi | July 30, 2012, 3:32 pmThis paper provides a very interesting idea in management of images according to their contents. User experience study demonstrated in this work provides a clear view for future modification of the management algorithm. One of the interesting points taken from this study is that “users do not appreciate continuousness of images with the content from same person”.
Posted by S. SHARIAT | July 30, 2012, 5:09 pmDue attention to the two new photo streaming interfaces introduced in the context, the paper seems proper in order to extend some new techniques for future of photo sharing. The idea of managing many pictures coming from different people looks interesting when all of the pictures could be seen just in a single table.
Posted by s.soodmand | July 30, 2012, 6:56 pmNowadays, due to easy accessible cameras over the mobile phones, people are dealing with loads of taken photos. This triggers the necessity of handling and managing theses photos in a good and easy way. In this regard, this paper brought a novel idea in order to deal with this issue. The application prototype and experimental study proves that the proposed idea is a practical solution.
Posted by Ebrahim Ghazisaeedi | July 30, 2012, 7:54 pmThe paper provides good insight into novel ways of photo sharing and reviewing. Various bits of information about each photo, such as time and place of the photo as well as the identity of the photographer and social connections between different photographers were used in an interesting and promising way in order to propose novel methods of organising and presenting photographs. It would be interesting to see how such explicitly provided information can be combined with information inferred automatically from the visual contents of the image in order to further enhance the user experience by providing even more intelligent options for presenting the content.
The multiple window presentation seems to be an interesting and relatively novel idea for photo presentation where users can follow different events in each window which are tied together with a unifying factor such as time.
An interesting point made in the paper by one of the participants was that they were not particularly happy to view multiple photos of another person with people they didn’t know. It would be interesting to look into ways of personalising photo streams for a particular user which can take into account the social connections of the particular user. Presumably, such information can be obtained from social networks such as Facebook.
Posted by P. Mortazavian | July 31, 2012, 9:00 pmThis work provides an novel view on presentation of multi-source image collections from perspective of an end user. The observations from the user study raise interesting points about sense of event completeness, time awareness or alignment of own life with experiences of others over time. This shows that there is a potential demand for this type of presentation in the user community. However, it opens several technical questions about a right form of user interface and its functionality.
In my opinion, flexibility is the key aspect and a user should have extensive control over the visualisation. This allows them tailor their interaction according to the content they are watching, the current mood they are in, the kind of information they are looking for etc.
For instance, the speed of viewing described in the paper is an important factor which changes with respect to temporal frequency of the image data. The image transition interval proportional to time offset is a good idea bringing a sense of time. But it can provide unbalanced experience if the images were captured in bursts over time (especially in multi-source scenario). The user should have an interactive option to change the pace of viewing while maintaining proportionality with the real time. This would allow “temporal zoom-in” when there is something of interest happening or zoom-out to skim swiftly over boring events. The fast forward in time brings issues with displaying a lot of content over a short period of time. I agree with the authors that summarisation of image collections is a suitable way how to tackle this problem.
Another interesting point is how to work with an arbitrary number of sources. The paper describes two scenarios: single view, multi view with 4 sources. But again in the name of flexibility, it might be interesting for the user to have simultaneously several single-view, multi-view instances. User interface would allow an arbitrary assignments of individual sources to the views. However, this is getting close to complex analysis of visual data over time (but I could imagine an application for surveillance for example).
Posted by Martin Klaudiny | August 1, 2012, 2:19 amThe authors identify a problem arising out of the increasing ease of taking photos: they are so much cheaper to take than with film, we can store so many on our camera that we rarely run out of room, and with smartphones we are much more likely to have our camera with us. So now what do we do with all that stuff and how do we share it. Some interesting aspects of that issue are explored. I’m curious to know how other people do it, and indeed how prolific shutterbugs from the old days of film managed that problem. Coping with orders of magnitude increases in the amount of stuff we have (in this case photos) often calls for different methods. We can often gain insight from the cations of earlier extreme users. Back then having thousands of photos was rare – now it is commonplace.
Posted by Michael Bernard Twidale | August 1, 2012, 10:55 pm