Surfacing images of a collection based on device context

Users have extensive collections of digital photographs or videos on their devices. This disclosure describes techniques to select images from a user’s collection that are relevant to the current context of the device and the user, and display the selected images on a device. The images are labelled with attributes relevant to the context at the time of capture of the images. At a later time, display of past images is triggered based on a variety of conditions related to current context and device activity. Past images having attributes that match the current context are selected and displayed. Displayed images are relevant to the user’s current context, allowing more interesting and relevant images to automatically be presented to the user