An adaptive, interactive visual workspace for viewing groups of files based on their relationships. Relationships of files are visualized using iterative refinement of categories through a direct-manipulation graph-based layout. The visual workspace starts with a fully connected graph linking thumbnail images of related files that is then partitioned into neighborhoods in response to a user creating file stacks corresponding to different categories. Normalized spring lengths improve the overall quality of the layout. Different modes for membership in neighborhoods avoid confusing motion of files and help a user to manually organize the workspace. Additionally, retrieved files can be added without having to significantly move the previous files. Different visualization techniques indicate which files are related to each other. An elliptical-shaped window displaying rings of elliptic thumbnail images presents a group of files in an easily visible and space-efficient way. Different zoom rates are used for file location, and surrogate sizes allow users to increase the separation between files while still increasing the surrogate sizes.