Submitted to the faculty of the School of Informatics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Sciences in the School of Informatics Indiana University December 2005 / Digital photography has largely replaced traditional film-based photography. Low cost and easy creation of digital files encourage people to take more photographs (photos) than before. Photo management involves selecting photos for placement into albums for future review and publishing them through different media in order to share with others. Photoware is designed to help people manage a large amount of digital photographs. To manage digital photos more efficiently, not only does software performance need to be improved, but also the usability of the software design needs to be refined. Well designed interfaces are one of the solutions to expedite the photo management tasks. The purpose of the study was to design a new photoware interface that would allow users to execute photo management tasks more efficiently. A three-phase study was designed to assess and compare Adobe Photoshop Album with Google Picasa. Phase one identified two major features that were problematic: 1) visibility of images with the photo tray features and 2) the non-existence of export templates that allow photo format settings to be placed into memory for future use. In Phase two, these two features were designed and implemented through paper and dynamic prototypes. Phase three consisted of usability testing of the prototypes. Thirty university students participated in a time-on-task study to measure the performance of the new interface. Also, user preferences were recorded through a post-task questionnaire. The users performed more quickly on the interface design with the two new features, as well as preferred them over the existing products when using mean values. However, the statistical correlation (Spearman - rank order correlation) between the two usability variables was not significant. The lack of correlation was supported by Frøkjær et al.’s view that usability measures should be considered independently. In other words, task time performance alone cannot be used to predict general user preference, because subjective preference could be affected by a range of other factors.

<p>This thesis presents Pixgis; a novel application for map-centric management of photographs. In short Pixgis is an interactive environment in which photographs may be discovered, viewed and managed through maps. With Pixgis finding photographs from a specific location or of a particular structure is as easy as finding the location or structure on a map. As Pixgis simultaneously displays maps, photographs and spatial metadata it also enables users to analyze photographs in new manners. This thesis work illustrates the benefits of applications for map-centric management of photographs, exposes the problems one faces when implementing such applications and presents novel solutions to many of these problems. The thesis also elaborates on spatial metadata and methods for acquisition of photographs with embedded spatial metadata.</p>

This thesis presents Pixgis; a novel application for map-centric management of photographs. In short Pixgis is an interactive environment in which photographs may be discovered, viewed and managed through maps. With Pixgis finding photographs from a specific location or of a particular structure is as easy as finding the location or structure on a map. As Pixgis simultaneously displays maps, photographs and spatial metadata it also enables users to analyze photographs in new manners. This thesis work illustrates the benefits of applications for map-centric management of photographs, exposes the problems one faces when implementing such applications and presents novel solutions to many of these problems. The thesis also elaborates on spatial metadata and methods for acquisition of photographs with embedded spatial metadata.