PhotoSpread: A Spreadsheet for Managing Photos

The goal of the BioACT Project at Stanford is to help biodiversity researchers Acquire digital materials in the field, manage these online holdings (Curate), and Transfer the knowledge (or disseminate) to other researchers, museums, and the public. We are developing three sets of tools: (i) tools for speedy data entry and small-group collaboration in the field, (ii) tools for large scale collaboration in distributed collection curation, and (iii) tools for semidirected search and browsing of digital biodiversity materials.Currently, the biologists use spreadsheets to analyze the photos. Each photograph is represented by a row in the spreadsheet. One column gives the file name where the photo is stored, and the other columns give the metadata (date, species, etc.). Once the data is in the spreadsheet, they can select and group photos of interest and compute relevant statistics. In this paper, we describe Photospread in more detail. We discuss the supported formula language, and we describe how drag-and-drop actions work. We also compare Photospread to other photo browsing and analysis tools.