1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique which searches a recording medium for a desired image and displays the image.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent digital cameras, the image quality, i.e., the number of pixels forming image data is significantly increasing as the degree of integration of a CCD increases, and the data amount per image data is increasing accordingly. Also, memory cards having nonvolatile flash memory are most often used as recording media in present digital cameras. Since the recording capacities of the present memory cards are limited, memory cards having larger capacities are developed one after another. In addition, the digital camera having, instead of a memory card, a hard disk drive or magnetooptical disk drive capable of recording image data such as a motion image having a large volume is proposed (e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-036786).
Unfortunately, when a user wants to reproduce image data recorded on the large-capacity recording medium described above on the display screen of the main body of the digital camera having the recording medium, it takes a long time to find desired image data because the number of image data is huge.
Also, the conventional digital cameras have a function of displaying one image on the display screen, and an index display function of simultaneously displaying a plurality of reduced images on the display screen. Even when the index display function is used, however, the number of images which can be displayed on the display screen is at most about 10. Therefore, finding a desired image from, e.g., 10,000 or more recorded images is not easy and very time-consuming for the user.