Direct annotation: a drag-and-drop strategy for labeling photos

Annotating photographs is such a time-consuming, tedious and error-prone data entry task that it discourages most owners of personal photo libraries. By allowing the user to drag labels, such as personal names, from a scrolling list and drop them onto a photo, we believe we can make the task faster, easier and more appealing. Since the names are entered in a database, searching for all photos of a friend or family member is dramatically simplified. We describe the user interface design and the database schema to support direct annotation, as implemented in our PhotoFinder prototype.