Understanding photowork

Abstract

In this paper we introduce the notion of "photowork" as the activities people perform with their digital photos after cap-ture but prior to end use such as sharing. Surprisingly, these processes of reviewing, downloading, organizing, editing, sorting and filing have received little attention in the litera-ture yet they form the context for a large amount of the 'search' and 'browse' activities so commonly referred to in studies of digital photo software. Through a deeper under-standing of photowork using field observation and inter-views, we seek to highlight its significance as an interaction practice. At the same time, we discover how "search" as it is usually defined may have much less relevance than new ways of browsing for the design of new digital photo tools, in particular, browsing in support of the photowork activi-ties we describe.