--- title: Browse views description: Browse is a full-screen visual surface — eight layouts over the same search and filters, including a timeline and visual-similarity clusters. section: guides order: 8 updated: 2026-07-09 verified: 2026-07-09 related: [guides/map-browsing, guides/public-discovery, guides/ai-analysis, reference/supported-file-formats, guides/cultural-sensitivity] features: [browse-views, map-browse, document-rendering, video-hover-previews] --- # Browse views Skim thousands of artifacts as pure imagery: Browse fills the screen with thumbnails, and one toolbar switches between eight ways of arranging them — from a plain grid to a timeline and clusters of visually similar material. Open it at `/your-institution/browse`, or scope it to one collection at `/your-institution/c/collection-slug/browse`. Visitors see public artifacts; signed-in members see what their role allows, and child-safe filtering applies as usual. ## Pick a view The toolbar's view switcher (keyboard `1`–`8`) offers: - **Grid, Masonry, Rows, Cards, Table** — scrolling layouts. Masonry is the default; Cards adds titles and descriptions; Table is a compact sortable listing. - **Timeline** — artifacts on a horizontal time axis with a density strip for scrubbing between decades; drag the handles at either edge of the strip's highlighted window to widen or narrow the visible range (Ctrl+scroll and pinch zoom too). Undated material collects in a tray at the right edge. - **Clusters** — groups of visually similar artifacts (see below). - **Map** — geographic browse for artifacts with located places; covered in [Browse artifacts on a map](/docs/en-US/guides/map-browsing). Your device remembers where you left off and restores it next time you open a plain Browse link: the last view you used, your sort choice, the timeline span you had panned or zoomed to, and the map position and zoom. A shared link always wins — anything spelled out in the URL overrides what your device remembered. ## Preview a document's pages without opening it Multi-page documents — scanned PDFs and rendered Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OpenDocument files — carry a small page-count badge ("6 pp.") on their thumbnail in Grid, Masonry, Rows, and Cards view; single-page documents get no badge. Table view's small thumbnails stay plain — no badge, page-flip, or video preview there. Hover the thumbnail (or move keyboard focus to it) and it flips through the first few pages once, then settles back on the cover; move the pointer away and back to play it again. If your system has reduced motion turned on, the thumbnail stays on the cover and the page-count badge is your cue that there's more inside. Culturally-restricted documents show only their cover page here, even if the full document has more pages — see [Cultural Sensitivity Review](/docs/en-US/guides/cultural-sensitivity#community-protocol) for what triggers that restriction. This preview isn't available in Timeline view or on the small thumbnails in list-style rows elsewhere in the product; open the artifact to page through the full document there. ## Preview a video without opening it Video thumbnails show a poster frame and a duration badge. Hover a video's thumbnail (or move keyboard focus to it) and a short, silent preview plays in place — a few moments sampled from across the recording rather than just the opening seconds, so a video that starts with a title card or black frames still shows you what's inside. The clip plays once and returns to the poster; move the pointer away and back to play it again. A few things keep this from getting in the way: - The preview is generated in the background after a video is added. Until it's ready — and for very short videos, which never get one — the thumbnail stays a still poster. - If your system has reduced motion turned on, or your browser asks for reduced data use, thumbnails stay still; the duration badge remains your cue that the item is a video. - On touch-only devices, thumbnails stay still. - Culturally-restricted videos never play a preview — they show only their poster frame, for the same reason restricted documents show only their cover ([Cultural Sensitivity Review](/docs/en-US/guides/cultural-sensitivity#community-protocol)). Previews play in the scrolling Browse views and on artifact cards elsewhere in the product. Timeline markers and map pins stay still. ## Search, filter, and sort The toolbar search narrows every view as you type, including matches in transcripts and OCR text. Press `/` to jump to the search box and `Esc` to clear it. The filter drawer applies type, creator, subject, place, people, and date filters directly. Everything lives in the URL, so any filtered view can be bookmarked or shared. Sorting changes what "first" means: **Featured** (the default) leads with the most visually interesting material, and a search switches to relevance order. The timeline pins itself to date order, and the map has no order at all — those two disable the sort control. ## Group by visual similarity: the Clusters view The Clusters view answers "what does this collection look like?" — it takes the first 500 artifacts of whatever you're currently browsing and arranges them into islands of visually similar images: portraits gather in one place, buildings in another, documents in a third. Similarity comes from the image analysis that runs when photos are ingested (see [AI analysis](/docs/en-US/guides/ai-analysis)), not from titles or subjects — two photographs cluster together because they look alike, even if they're cataloged differently. A few things follow from that: - **Only analyzed images take part.** Artifacts whose primary image hasn't been through vision analysis are left out of this view rather than guessed at. If nothing in scope has been analyzed yet, the view says so and offers the grid instead. - **The sample follows your scope and sort.** Search, filters, collection scope, and the active sort all apply — the view clusters the *top 500* of the current order. In a larger result set, a notice shows how much of the scope is on screen; narrow with filters to cluster a different slice. - **The grouping is stable.** The same scope produces the same clusters every time — clusters shift only when the underlying result set changes. Drag to pan and scroll the wheel or pinch to zoom at the pointer; `+`/`-` on the keyboard zoom too. Zoom in far enough and captions pin on. Selecting a thumbnail opens the artifact record. The camera position is kept in the URL, so a link to a particular cluster lands the recipient at the same vantage point. ## Keyboard reference | Keys | Action | | --- | --- | | `1`–`8` | Switch view | | `/` | Focus search; `Esc` clears | | Arrow keys | Move the focus ring (clusters) | | `+` / `-` | Zoom (clusters) | Every camera-driven view keeps a **Switch to grid view** button on screen, so keyboard and screen-reader users always have a conventional layout one action away.