In my previous post I had mused about adding sense to the media library. I was considering how one could make a media libary - tagged for people, locations and time - available in an entertaining way. The departure point for this thought process was the growing number of family and personal pictures that I currently have and manage but for which the tools are so arcane that my family would not enjoy using them.

Since then the idea has continued to pop into my thoughts demanding refinement. As a follower of GTD principles I figured that if I was to ever stop my brain from tinkering with this I’d better start jotting things down. Hopefully that’ll save me from having to keep track of things in my head and this constrantly rummaging around up there.

So where does this leave us? Being a visually oriented person, my first stop is the main screen and how it should work.

The PictoSense screen layout

Borrowing ideas from existing applications I managed scape together a first stab at a screen design without too much effort. Below you’ll see one of several screen mock ups that I’ve come up with: “map room”. Other designs, yet to be illustrated, will follow the same idea but instead of having a world map you see the “image carousel” or the “relationships map“.

The map room screen

The main features of this screen are a map with tagged locations, a timeline browser and a keyword browser. All 3 elements will interact with each other such that changing say the zoom level on the map will influence the timeline and keywords displays.

Features of the world map

The user is able to zoom and pan the map (1), switch between several views (2) such as Sattelite, Map or hybrid. On the map the user will find either markers (icons or thumbnails) representing locations where pictures were taken. The location of the markers is derived from the picture’s latitude and longitude meta data fields.

The number of markers on the map is constrained by all of the following criteria:

• Area of the map: you will not see any markers for locations not directly visible on the screen. (This may sound silly but you would not believe what I’ve seen coded across my professional experience.)
• The “current window” of the timeline browser: You will only see markers for images for which the capture date (an Exif metadata field) falls between the start and end dates that the “current window” specifies.
• The selected keyword(s) if any: You will only see markers which relate to the selected keywords. If no keywords are selected (or available) the map contents will not be constrained by this criteria.

Markers on the map can be either pictures or icons. Clicking on a marker will pop-up a larger version of the image along with selected meta data information (e.g. caption, keywords, capture date, etc.)

Features of the timeline browser

The user is able to see a timeline representing all the images in the library. Within this timeline he can set a “time window” which acts as a constraint for the world map, carousel or relationships map. The timeline has a histogram representing the number of images captured at a given point in time.

The timeline will be constrained by the earliest and latest caputure time of all images in the library. The time interval markers (eg. year, month, week day) will vary depending on the time span of the library. Several implementations are possible (see example 1, example 2, and a really neat one).

Features of the keyword list

The user is able to see keywords of all the pictures within the current “time window”. The size of the keywords is relative to the number of times each keyword appears within the set of images. Selecting one or more keywords will constrain the number of markers on the map. Unselecting a keyword will remove the constraint.

The selected keywords will not cause the size of the histogram to change. They will however cause the histogram bars (dates) of the related pictures to be highlighted. This will occur for the entire timeline and not just the current “time window”. This gives a visual form of feedback to the user of the times at which selected pictures were taken without modifying the height of the histogram which would be distracting.

Further thinking

The screen design and features are very early in their lifecycle at this stage. There are many more things which need to be considered and which during the writing of this have tickled my brain. What options should be provided, what happens to slections on changes in the “time window” etc.

For now though, there’s enough on paper for my brain to stop playing tricks on me by calling this topic to the forefront at the most inappropriate of times.