Patent ID: 7725837
Filing Date: 2010-05-25
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A method of allowing a user to interactively zoom in and out of thumbnails displayed in a display area, the method comprising: enabling a user to control the size of the thumbnails in the display area by interactively changing a zoom level that correspondingly expands and contracts the thumbnails displayed in the display area, wherein the thumbnails comprise resizings of images in a collection of images being navigated via the changes in zoom level; as the user is zooming in to cause the thumbnails to be correspondingly displayed in the display area such that they appear to gradually increase in size relative to the display area, the thumbnails including a plurality of representative thumbnails that also appear to be increasing in size during the zooming in, each representative thumbnail representing a cluster of thumbnails not initially displayed during the zooming in, and during the zooming in repeatedly checking if a first zoom threshold is reached, and automatically responding to determining that the first zoom threshold is reached during the zooming by: automatically reducing the size of the displayed representative thumbnails in the display area, and using space created thereby to automatically newly display in the display area clusters of thumbnails represented by the representative thumbnails, respectively; and after automatically decreasing the size of the displayed representative thumbnails and newly displaying the clusters of thumbnails, continuing the zooming in by the user which causes the reduced representative thumbnails continue to appear to gradually increase in size and which causes any thumbnails in the clusters that are in the display area to also appear to gradually increase in size.