Systems and methods for image exploration are provided. One aspect of the systems and methods includes identifying a set of images; reducing the set of images to obtain a representative set of images that is distributed throughout the set of images by removing a neighbor image based on a proximity of the neighbor image to an image of the representative set of images; arranging the representative set of images in a grid structure using a self-sorting map (SSM) algorithm; and displaying a portion of the representative set of images based on the grid structure.