Browsing digital photos usually means scrolling through them chronologically, unless they have been sorted into folders and collections. This week a startup company called Everpix began offering an alternative: a system that uses machine vision software to analyze each photo for its content so that photos can be browsed using categories such as “city,” “animals,” “people,” and “nature.”

The category-based view, called Explore, is now a feature of the company’s iPad and iPhone apps. It joins an existing feature of those apps and the company’s website that provides a way to browse the “highlights” from a collection of photos in a particular year. Those highlights are compiled into a scrollable collage by software that looks for signals suggesting that a photo is high-quality and interesting.