Lifelines provide a general visualization environment for personal histories that can be applied to medical and court records, professional histories and other types of biographical data. A one-screen overview shows multiple facets of the records. A simple representation of those records would be seen as a sequence of point events that have a date or interval events that have a range of dates.

Good Features

Lifelines has many good features to represent information. For example, medical conditions or legal cases are displayed as individual time lines, while icons indicate discrete events; Line color and thickness illustrate relationships or significance, rescaling tools and filters allow users to focus on part of the information. Lifelines can also reduce the chances of missing information, facilitate the spotting of anomalies and trends, Streamline the access to details, and remain simple and tailorable to various applications.
 
 

In order to visualize photos using Lifelines, we should first organize photo data to fit it into Lifelines. At the same time we might want to maintain as much as possible useful information about those photos, which is stated separately as follows:
 

When

The date when the photo is taken is crucial to Lifelines, because basically Lifelines is suitable to visualize types of biographical data. It is also an important information for the photo. The horizontal axis is used to represent time interval while those photos are represented by a single dot.

Where

The location where the photo is taken is also a useful information. The label in Lifelines is used to represent it. The same location in a photo cluster, which is usually in this case, will show only once. You may also use tips in Lifelines to visualize this information.

What

All the photos are organized into different groups by the certain event they belongs to, such as Ben's Birthday, Ski tour, Visit to Osaka or CHI94 Conference. A single facet in Lifelines represents every event. Photos in this event are spanning within this facet according to the time attribute. Those photos in the same date and same event will be clustered as a vertical dotted line in the facet.

Who

The persons in the picture are also interested information people might want to visualize. A special data element called addinfo in Lifelines is used to keep the person name of the photos. In the tool you may right click a photo to display this addinfo and see who is in the picture. Person is also coded with a unique ID to help filter or search the photos, which we will state later.

Size Coding

The most suitable information for size coding is number of persons in the photo. Longer dot represents more people in this picture and shorter represents less people.

Color Coding

The color coding is used to represent if the photo is indoor or outdoor, without lost generality, red represent indoor picture, while blue represent outdoor picture.

The personal photo library using Lifelines begin with an overview of the entire record as below:
 

This overview screen gives users a better sense of the type and information about the photos. Each facet represent a certain event, the photos for the same event grouped into this facet and you can easily visualize the date and location by time interval and label of the picture. Different size means the number of the persons in the photo and red dot means indoor picture and blue means outdoor picture. Right click the photo dot will show the persons in this picture.

Screen size limits the number of event and photo dots, which can be displayed, Scroll bars are the common answer to pixel shortage. Lifelines offer another option: facets can be opened and closed in an outliner fashion. A closed facet only reveals the "silhouette" of the record (i.e. compacted lines with no labels, but color is preserved) as below:

Detail on Demand

In Lifelines, All events visible on the display form a giant menu giving rapid access to detailed information (triggered by a double click on the photo dot). The photo image will appear in the right frame of the page. And while the mouse move above the dot, correspond information will appear on the top text box, such as the exact date the picture taken, location of the pictures in the file system or URL, etc.

Zooming, Filtering and Searching

Zooming in and out (or in this case "re-scaling") can be done either by using the zoom-and-pan slider at the bottom of the display, or by clicking on the background of the image near the events that should end-up in the center of the zoomed image.

In addition to the implicit vertical and horizontal relationships, searches can be performed on the entire record, highlighting all parts of the photo that match. Below is a simple text search for "Ben" in all pictures, which will highlight all the photos which contains a person whose name has "Ben".
　

Other options for Lifelines can also be used in Photo library. For example, Lifelines has a control panel to manage layout, label, font size, Summary, Search conditions and effects, zooming scale, etc. Use those options may help you understand more about the photos.

Date is most important in the photo library using Lifelines. But what happen if there is no specified date associate with those photos, which is possible in many personal photo collections. Lifeline is not able to show information without specific date. In our HCIL photo collection, some exact date has been forgotten. We have to use 1-1-92 to represent some date in 1992, that's why we have a lot of photos in the same day.

Not be able to sort

A shortcoming for Lifelines is it can not perform any sort operation to the data. For example, although size coding can be used to represent the number of persons in the photo, a sorted list of the photos by the number of persons in the photo can not be obtained.

Good Features in LifeLines don't apply

Although all the photos have date associated, they still not a strictly biographical data. So many desired features in Lifelines are not able to show in our personal photo library. The most obvious one is all the photos are single dot or point, there are no lines because usually the date for one photo doesn't span for an interval of time. This make it harder to analysis trend or relationship between the lines in normal Lifelines.

Other information doesn't show

There is still some information about those photos which can't show in our photo library, such as if the photo is color or black white, what type of the photo, etc. Although we can change color coding or sizing coding to represent new attribute, there seems no trivial way to specified color coding and size coding in Lifelines.

Space Utilization

Space  Utilization is a big problem for Lifelines, especially for our photo library. As you can see in the interface, there are a lot of space which is not used. This is because we organize date into diffrent facets, and the event in the same facet could be small while the number of facets could be large. In our photo library case, a lot of events (facet) only have few single photos or a large number of pictures happened in the same date. All of this will caurse a large amount of space not used. Also, as increasing of the number of facets, user will not be able to overview the whole data in one screen and may scrool a lot to find desirable information.

Data Conversion

How to convert general photo data from normal database format to specific Lifelines data format is not trivial. Tools may be implemented to make the conversion more easily and user friendly.