Pixaura: Supporting Tentative Decision Making when Selecting and Sharing Digital Photos

Current advances in digital technology promote capturing and storing more digital photos than ever. While photo collections are growing in size, the amount of time that can be devoted to viewing, managing, and sharing digital photos remains constant. Photo decision-making and selection has been identified as key to addressing this concern. After conducting exploratory research on photo decisionmaking including a wide-scale survey of user behaviors, detailed contextual inquiries, and longer-term diary studies, Pixaura was designed to address problems that emerged from our research. Specifically, Pixaura aims to bridge the gap between importing source photos and sharing them with others, by supporting tentative decision-making within the selection process. For this experience, the system incorporates certain core elements: 1) flexibility to experiment with relationships between photos and groups of photos, 2) the ability to closely couple photos while sharing only a subset of those photos, and 3) a tight connection between the photo selection and photo sharing space.