Organizing Photos
Every so often, a friend of mine creates a photo album on Facebook called "Random stuff" or something similar, the contents of which have no common thread save for the fact that they were taken by the same person carting around a camera with them. (I find these are generally the most entertaining albums to click through.)
I don't take a whole lot of digital photos and I don't own a camera, but most of my friends have had one for at least a few years now. The expense of taking a digital photograph is essentially zero, so lots of people have been taking a camera with them almost everywhere, taking photos without a second thought (taking two or three at times to make sure one comes out), and then periodically dumping these things onto their home computer. Which means that most people probably have dozens and dozens of folders in their "My Pictures" folder, each one named after the date on which the directory was created, and each one containing dozens of hundreds of photographs.
Organizing all of these photos is one big pain that's only going to get worse as we go forward. The only way of dealing with all of this clutter is to manually parse through all of these files, look at each one, and figure out where it goes. If memory serves, you can pluck out all of the interesting photos from your Aunt Marge's wedding and put them online into a single photo album.
The problem with albums, just like with directories on our computer, is that every photo ends up in a single place. (You could start copying photos around into multiple directories, but this would just compound the nightmare.) Tagging alleviates this problem to some degree...each person on Facebook has an album that's "theirs". I didn't take most of the photos, but if anyone tags me in any photo in any album, it becomes a part of my "Jim McGaw" album. Other photo services like Flickr offer this kind of functionality on crack, and it allows for an almost infinite number of clumps to appear.
It's not helpful that most of the photos are assigned auto-incrementing generic names like "IMG_0521201011.jpg", which have no semantic meaning whatsoever. Google's Picasa photo-sharing service has a feature that is able to recognize the faces of people you know so they can be auto-associated with these photos, eliminating the need for manual tagging. It's interesting to ponder a future in which digital cameras will be able to tag photos for you, either based on the people in them or other content it can detect, and these tags could be used to organize content before it even reaches your computer or the Internet. Or, at the very least, maybe it would solve the naming problem.
My guess is that someone already tried to do this, but the camera's interface ended up being dozens and dozens of tiny buttons that would make even a seasoned engineer weep. I'd be interested in seeing what it looks like when someone (Apple?) gets it right.
I don't take a whole lot of digital photos and I don't own a camera, but most of my friends have had one for at least a few years now. The expense of taking a digital photograph is essentially zero, so lots of people have been taking a camera with them almost everywhere, taking photos without a second thought (taking two or three at times to make sure one comes out), and then periodically dumping these things onto their home computer. Which means that most people probably have dozens and dozens of folders in their "My Pictures" folder, each one named after the date on which the directory was created, and each one containing dozens of hundreds of photographs.
Organizing all of these photos is one big pain that's only going to get worse as we go forward. The only way of dealing with all of this clutter is to manually parse through all of these files, look at each one, and figure out where it goes. If memory serves, you can pluck out all of the interesting photos from your Aunt Marge's wedding and put them online into a single photo album.
The problem with albums, just like with directories on our computer, is that every photo ends up in a single place. (You could start copying photos around into multiple directories, but this would just compound the nightmare.) Tagging alleviates this problem to some degree...each person on Facebook has an album that's "theirs". I didn't take most of the photos, but if anyone tags me in any photo in any album, it becomes a part of my "Jim McGaw" album. Other photo services like Flickr offer this kind of functionality on crack, and it allows for an almost infinite number of clumps to appear.
It's not helpful that most of the photos are assigned auto-incrementing generic names like "IMG_0521201011.jpg", which have no semantic meaning whatsoever. Google's Picasa photo-sharing service has a feature that is able to recognize the faces of people you know so they can be auto-associated with these photos, eliminating the need for manual tagging. It's interesting to ponder a future in which digital cameras will be able to tag photos for you, either based on the people in them or other content it can detect, and these tags could be used to organize content before it even reaches your computer or the Internet. Or, at the very least, maybe it would solve the naming problem.
My guess is that someone already tried to do this, but the camera's interface ended up being dozens and dozens of tiny buttons that would make even a seasoned engineer weep. I'd be interested in seeing what it looks like when someone (Apple?) gets it right.