Since
photography was invented, images of people and places have
had a limited shelf life. Over time, they largely just disappeared.
Prints, negatives and albums got lost and left behind. A
large chunk of them ended up in landfill.
For example, extensive
photographic evidence of my father’s
childhood may exist somewhere, possibly in a box somewhere
in an attic in England where he was born, but not anywhere
in my house. I have perhaps two or three photos of him before
his mid twenties and no more than three dozen of him -- usually
featuring me or my sister – taken after that.
By contrast,
my mother’s childhood is much more thoroughly
documented, and, if she hadn’t decided just before she
died at 92 to destroy most photos of her in her teenage years
and twenties (for reasons I can only speculate about), I
would have a relatively thorough visual representation of her
life
from child through to being a grandmother.
I also have an entire
box of photos of me up to about my fourteenth birthday and
a an album filled with images of my grandfather
from his 30 or so years in India. And then there are the
snapshots of my married life, largely centred on my daughter
and my wife,
since I was the one taking the pictures.
However, many of the
film camera photos in my possession are out of focus, badly
lit, faded and just plain awful by today’s standards. And the negatives
or transparencies, which might just hold the possibility of better images, are
long gone.
Sure, I promised myself when I was a young man that I’d hang
on to the
negatives of photos I took, because my parents hadn’t kept theirs, but,
with very few exceptions, these too have disappeared. Maybe when I go to sell
the house I’ll find the originals in the back of a cupboard, but I doubt
it.
Someday, I keep telling myself, I will scan every image
that remains and keep them safe digitally. Well, maybe and
maybe not. Even though I’m no longer
working full time, I’m having a hard enough time just keeping up with the
photos that I take almost on a weekly basis.
Over the past few years, I’ve
piled up literally thousands of files of photos taken since I got a digital camera,
plus the edited versions. They are
on a backup drive of my computer which in turn is backed up to another drive.
As well, just in case, they are also being kept on Amazon’s online digital
storage service. I don’t know how much safer I could get.
But this remarkable
(for me) diligence in preserving my photos introduces yet another problem and
that’s simply keeping track of them and putting my
hands on them (metaphorically, of course) when I need them. And this is a problem
faced by almost everyone who acquires a digital camera and uses it for at least
a couple of years.
If I were a professional photographer I would do this image
tracking without hesitation. If my living depended on it then my attention
on the matter would
be even more a day-to-day task than it is.
Certainly, when I was working as a
journalist on a daily newspaper I kept every transcribed interview and every
piece of backup information on my computer using
various programs designed for exactly this purpose. I never knew when someone
might demand proof of what someone had said. In fact, even now I’m retired
from that life I can’t bring myself to destroy what I collected, including
the MP3 files of the recorded interviews.
What makes this computer preservation
of the transcriptions of these interviews incredibly simple, of course, is
that word processing files (I keep most of my
stuff in Word documents, PDFs or plain text) can be scanned for content by
information management programs like EagleFiler,
Yep,
Yojimbo and
DevonThink
Pro for the Mac or
equivalents like Evernote
for Windows.
Tracking
the content of image files is, unless you have a lot of time and (often) money
to spend on expensive software, much more difficult.
There are of course
programs like iPhoto (about which more in my next column) and Aperture on the Mac and the cross platform entry
from Adobe, Lightroom which
allow you to keep a handle on your photos.
However, I have found through experimentation
with Lightroom and Aperture – both
of which will set you back a whopping $300 Cdn -- that they are far more about
workflow and processing RAW files than they are about tracking what you own.
To use them properly requires that you have already set up a pretty good system
of folders and subfolders to begin with.
And I do know people who, having laid
out $600 for Photoshop, use that as a way of filing their photos for easy access,
although, again, that’s not its
primary purpose.
Better for organization are dedicated digital asset management
programs like the Mac-based Microsoft
Expression Media which
costs $300, and ACDSee 10 Photo
Manager for Windows computers,
which is an incredible reasonable $39.95 and ACDSee Pro 2 at $130.
And there’s
also the cross-platform Extensis Portfolio, at $200, which
is my choice for the Mac if you’ve got $200 to spend above
and beyond Photoshop and other photo software.
Even so, Extensis and other programs
benefit greatly – unless you’re
just starting out with your first digital camera and you plan to let the catalogue
grow along with the images. – from a system already in place.
Over time
I’ve kept my photos arranged in a main folder called Photography
in which there are dozens of subfolders arranged by subject and date – such
as flower baskets – October, 2007. Initially, I batch rename all the original
images – whether they’re jpegs or tiffs or, more recently, RAW files,
with the same system of names, dates and give them individual numbers.
There’s
nothing worse than a bunch of files that say nothing more than IMG_0159.JPG and
IMG_0160.JPG. That’s incredibly unhelpful and a nightmare
if they don’t make it into a folder in the first place..
With a program
like Portfolio or iView Media Pro, however, once you suck the photos in, if
you want to do further classification you have to add tags
to each
file, something that involves a lot of thought.
For example, a photo of the dock
in Deep Cove, British Columbia where I live
might carry tags like “cove,” “dock,” “water,” “kayak,” etc.
And applying these tags is, no matter how automated the system, is tedious in
the extreme. It is difficult to force yourself to keep going after applying these
tags to the first 500 or so photos. I think I may have injured my back and arm
muscles doing it, hunched over the computer for hours on end.
Recently, a new
program (in public beta as I write this, but probably out on the market by
the time this column appears) appeared that may be, at least
for
Mac users, a glimpse at the future of finding individual files on a computer.
It’s
called Leap and its from Ironic Software, a Canadian company
What Leap, with an after-beta price of about $35, does is replace Mac
OSX’s finder and allow you to do searches based on what you remember
about a file. As their promo material says: “With Leap you find things
based on your natural memory of that file.”
So you recall that it was a large
Photoshop file of a basketball court and you remember what you likely called
it. Then you narrow down your search to file
type and the words basketball and or court and so on. I gave it a try – you
can download it and give it a run-through before buying -- and it worked well
for me, but, of course it would give users even better results if they (and here’s
that word again) tagged their files as they add the images to their hard drive.
However,
help may be on the way for all of us who find it hard to keep on tagging photos
and that’s a system being developed, which hopes to perfect software
using a description logic interface that will scan photos, analyse pixel clusters
and detect various objects in them . Then, if all goes well, the system will
be able to tag these photos automatically with words that will describe what
they contain.
In the meantime, however, we’re on our own. 
In case you thought the megapixel
race was dead, there comes the unsurprising news from Lyra Research that, no,
it’s
not. The firm predicted recently that by 2011 more than 75
per cent of the digital cameras sold worldwide will
have a resolution of eight megapixels or more.
In a press release Lyra’s director of consumer marketing intelligence,
Steve Hoffenberg, said that “while industry executives and camera-savvy
consumers acknowledge that image-quality factors other than resolution are also
important, few are resisting the urge to acquire even more pixels. Not only has
the megapixel race now slowed in the past year, it has actually accelerated.”
I can’t wait for those $40 megapixel point and shoots for $200.
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