Exploiting Location and Time for Photo Search and Storytelling in MyLifeBits

Location information can be used as an additional metadata to time in order to organize photos. Moreover, we believe location information derived from GPS tracks may be useful to look at and visualize for certain tasks. In this paper, we explore ways to organize images and location information, visualize them, and provide interactive operations such as filtering and replaying. Filtering over long ranges and visualizing while filtering as well as what is being filtered were problems we encountered. Our solution to these was a widget we developed called DoubleAlphaSlider, which is capable of filtering over long ranges, supports zoom together with an overview widget that displays the representation of the data and recent contexts that were zoomed from. In addition, we focused on how to help the user understand several derived properties of the data such as direction, adjacency in terms of time and place of subgroups of the data, which are called “trips” in our case.