Camelis: Organizing and Browsing a Personal Photo Collection with a Logical Information System

Since the arrival of digital cameras, many people are faced to the challenge of organizing and retrieving the overwhelming flow of photos their life produces. Most people put no metadata on their photos, and we believe this is because existing tools make a very limited use of them. We present a tool, Camelis, that offers users with an organization of photos that is dynamically computed from the metadata, making worthwhile the effort to produce it. Camelis is designed along the lines of Logical Information Systems (LIS), which are founded on logical concept analysis. Hence, (1) an expressive language can be used to describe photos and query the collection, (2) manual and automatic metadata can be smoothly integrated, and (3) expressive querying and flexible navigation can be mixed in a same search and in any order. This presentation is illustrated by experiences on a real collection of more