TiDi browser: A novel photo browsing technique for mobile devices

Today's digital photos can be tagged with information about when and where they were taken. On stationary computers, this information is often used to drive photo browsing. This is not the case for mobile devices. We describe first results of our current research on a novel photo browsing technique called TiDi Browser. TiDi Browser exploits time and location information available in digital photos to facilitate the identification of personal events and the detection of patterns of specific occurrences in time and space. Along with a main view and thumbnail previews, our browser application provides two time lines. One time line visualizes the number of photos taken per temporal unit (e.g., day, week, etc.). This allows users to easily detect personal events in time. The second time line visualizes location information. Since two- or three-dimensional locations are difficult to represent on small displays, we reduce the location information to one-dimensional distance information. The distance is shown in the second time line. Both time lines serve a second purpose as graphical user interface, meaning that they can be used to browse in time. Even larger photo collections can be browsed on very small displays intuitively and efficiently. We implemented our ideas in an interactive prototype that uses a client-server-architecture. To save bandwidth, we transmit appropriately scaled photos that fit the display dimensions of the client (mobile device). To enhance the user's browsing experience, we apply caching and prefetching strategies.