Digital Lifestyle and Entertainment
If we move ahead at the current rate of taking pictures, the average consumer having fun with his digital camera will have tens or even hundreds of thousands of pictures to manage in a few years time. For a professional, that could be terabytes of data. How are we going to manage this? Even more important: what are the unforeseen problems linked to this explosion of images? Can we even image the ripple effect of these changes?
The solution is the problem
The most common solution for this issue is to manage the pictures using a digital asset management system. And there is no lack of programs that offer to solve this problem, ranging in price from virtually free to hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are some excellent tools out there to manage images — but they don't solve the real problem: TOO MANY PICTURES.
On every level of the food chain we now create at least ten or fifteen times more pictures then before. We are already drowning in pictures today -- and this is without the cumulative effect of this evolution over time. It is not unreasonable to expect that a professional photographer snapping away with his digital SLR will have accumulated half a million pictures or more in a few years. How on earth is he going to deal with this? And how is the average consumer going to deal with the 50 000 pictures he might have taken during the same period, on a constantly increasing number of (only more or less compatible) devices? By adding keywords and meta-data manually? I don’t think so.
Beware of the ripple effect
In addition, this explosion of pictures is already creating significant ripple effects in the design and publishing industry today: the digital image clutter is starting to seriously challenge network bandwidth, server capacity and local storage needs.
And this is without even mentioning the workflow problems linked to digital imaging. The move from analog to digital photography has triggered significant shifts in competencies and is perturbing already complex publishing workflows.
And then there are the changes in data formats: RAW files (which record the totality of data captured by an image sensor) have become so popular they are even supported by consumer-level image databases, but they are much more complex to handle than standard file formats. In short, it is not surprising that for technology decision makers in design and publishing, digital imaging ranges very high among the shortlist of major preoccupations.
Calling all paradigm shifts
In fact, what is happening is quite simple: in digital photography, user adoption has evolved much faster than accompanying technology -- and much, much faster than the usage patterns that should allow us to deal with this onslaught of pictures. Basically, we have no idea what is hitting us - but that doesn’t stop us from taking pictures. And we are just at the beginning of an exponential curve.
This strange evolution is increasingly leading to a void between what pictures have become for us, the problems that they bring and the tools at our disposal to cope with them. Even the much-vaunted new search technologies will be helpless to find an image if we have not provided any metadata. And for the average user, adding metadata is ridiculously complicated, not necessarily because of our tools, but because we have NO previous experience how to do these things in an efficient way.
Since the arrival of the Internet, no single technology has evolved as spectacularly as digital imaging. And we are only at the beginning: we have no idea how this new force will inspire technology providers. There is already a significant effort deployed in shape and pattern recognition algorithms, allowing you, for instance, to find all portraits in a group of pictures. But a significant part of dealing with images will have to do with automatic meta-data generation.
Here are some other suggestions:
Camera manufacturers might build GPS receivers into their cameras. This would allow the camera to know where a picture is taken -- and make it much easier to find shots by location without manual tagging.
Computers might start tagging images automatically at import in a much more sophisticated way than we can imagine today, just by using available data on user preferences in an intelligent way. The key here is not so much how to do it, but to get smarter in figuring out WHICH information might be interesting to preserve. This could allow you for instance to find images sorted by the people you have sent them to.
But even beyond these relatively obvious ideas, there is room for major innovation, indeed for a genuine paradigm shift. The longer this evolution continues, the stronger the need for a drastic solution, for some really smart new way of dealing with images will be. What we will need, sooner or later, is a new paradigm for integrating digital images into our lives. By pushing it a little bit, one could just imagine an operating system for images. Or some other new paradigm or device for images we can not imagine today.
It is going to happen. Just wait and see…
©Pfeiffer Consulting 2005
The use of Digital Imaging is growing much faster than the tools and competencies necessary to organize vast quantities of images.
The common paradigms used for organizing pictures on the personal level demand much more effort and time than the average user is willing to spend.
The ripple effect of this explosion of images produces problems in a variety of areas, including network bandwidth and server capacity, as well as unforeseen workflow issues in design and publishing environments
Since the whole field of digital imaging is expanding much faster than the technologies that are meant to deal with it, it creates a strong pull for a paradigm shift in this field of technology
