Automatic organization for digital photographs with geographic coordinates

We describe PhotoCompas, a system that utilizes the time and location information embedded in digital photographs to automatically organize a personal photo collection. PhotoCompas produces browseable location and event hierarchies for the collection. These hierarchies are created using algorithms that interleave time and location to produce an organization that mimics the way people think about their photo collections. In addition, the algorithm annotates the generated hierarchy with geographical names. We tested our approach in case studies of three real-world collections and verified that the results are meaningful and useful for the collection owners.