Abstract
Photographs are snapshots of personal memories and image information is an indispensable medium for knowledge dissemination. In recent years, the widespread use of the Web and the rapidly dropping prices of digital cameras have led to the creation of large-scale personal image repositories. As a result, the importance of managing large image collections is constantly increasing. This paper describes Gallery – an experimental system under development. It is intended to support the management of personal image repositories that capture the user's valuable memories. This paper introduces the Gallery system and discusses the results of the two experiments that evaluated its feasibility. The results revealed that placing personal photo collections in a semantically meaningful layout on a zoomable surface considerably improved the efficiency of image information retrieval.