This paper presents a new interaction technique for browsing large visual information bases in a collaborative environment. The ATELIER project deals with learning environments for architecture and interaction design students. Since students' attitude is to collect large amounts of data, pictures and videos in particular, an important issue is how to keep information organized according to intuitive criteria has been seriously taken into account. This paper shows how we managed to align different approaches for browsing large image sets and describes the interfaces used to seamlessly switch from one view to another. We also implemented search facilities based both on color layout and on keywords taken from an ontology. Integration was achieved by means of physical handles, i.e., barcodes.