  Images sorted by similarity enables more images to be viewed simultaneously,
and can be very useful for stock photo agencies or e-commerce applications.
Visually sorted grid layouts attempt to arrange images so that their proximity
on the grid corresponds as closely as possible to their similarity. Various
metrics exist for evaluating such arrangements, but there is low experimental
evidence on correlation between human perceived quality and metric value. We
propose Distance Preservation Quality (DPQ) as a new metric to evaluate the
quality of an arrangement. Extensive user testing revealed stronger correlation
of DPQ with user-perceived quality and performance in image retrieval tasks
compared to other metrics. In addition, we introduce Fast Linear Assignment
Sorting (FLAS) as a new algorithm for creating visually sorted grid layouts.
FLAS achieves very good sorting qualities while improving run time and
computational resources.
