The photo problem or technology vs policy
In the old days my mother used to take pictures until her roll was full. Then she would take the filled roll to the photo shop where they printed the pictures. Once per year she took all photos and created one or more albums out of them. Those albums are chronical and physical artifacts that contain the images of her life.
Easy peasy the only thing was a fire or flood that could wipe them out which luckily never happened (knock on wood).
Enter digital photography. Basically the same principle applied. My mother takes pictures until her sd card is full. In stead of going to the shop she could put the pictures on her (single) pc. She stopped creating albums and we create a backup every once in a while which mitigates the risk of fire and floods.
Life was pretty simple so far. Then multiple PC’s started to appear. Where before all photo’s were on the same machine now the pictures are scattered between them because sometimes it is more convenient to import your pictures on your laptop and sometimes it’s convenient to import them on your PC.
Can you guess the next complicator? … Exactly more camera’s and camera’s in phones.
By this time the whole photo issue comes down to policy and all the technology in the world cannot bring this all together.
1. Always use the same convention when importing photos.
2. Copy the photos to the same location.
3. Think about automatic backup strategy
4. How can you access your photos from anywhere in the world (I use and am really happy with Carbonite)
It would be really cool if a platform takes over this hassle. The caveat, it must be multiplatform and it must be easy to add new sources of pictures and new storage locations. All known platforms lacks at least one of the above.
If you know of such a platform please let me know.