In recent years digital cameras have seen an enormous rise
in popularity, leading to a huge increase in the quantity of
digital photos being taken. This brings with it the challenge of organising these large collections. The MediAssist project uses date/time and GPS location for the
organisation of personal collections. However, this context
information is not always sufficient to support retrieval
when faced with a large, shared, archive made up of
photos from a number of users. We present work in this
paper which retrieves photos of known objects (buildings,
monuments) using both location information and content-based
retrieval tools from the AceToolbox. We show that
for this retrieval scenario, where a user is searching for
photos of a known building or monument in a large shared
collection, content-based techniques can offer a significant
improvement over ranking based on context (specifically
location) alone