TMCnet News
Jemima Kiss, technology writer(Guardian (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Somewhere upstairs in my partner Will's cold, dingy office, there's a collection of dusty, battered hard drives. They are not well-loved, and occasionally get used as doorstops. Yet hidden inside is an invaluable part of our family history - our collection of photos. Will is a photographer, and the sheer, overwhelming volume of pictures he has taken over the years has made it impossible even to begin to manage or access this collection. It's a source of constant frustration for my mother-in-law, who regularly bemoans the fact that her professional photographer son is unable to provide her with printed images of her grandchildren. He estimates he has half a million photos. It's insurmountable. We recently pulled out some photographs for our wedding invitation, discovering swathes of images we hadn't seen for years, or ever. I wondered if there is a point - similar to Dunbar's Law - beyond which we are unable to process volumes of information. The inaccessibility of our visual memory bank has become a real bone of contention. Last spring I spent three evenings editing and sorting a few thousand photos of us all. We moved house, and the hard drive disappeared. Maybe lost, maybe wiped. In the digital world, easy come, easy go. If we had had only 10 pictures in the world, would we have been more careful with them It wasn't always this way. I still have a shoe box of prints from my childhood, and crates of my Dad's slides. The relatively small number of photos in the family collection from when I was a child meant that many of them came to represent powerful, emotional links to our past: to favourite holidays, to my childhood home (now demolished). Later, with the death of my father, they took on a rather cruel disconnect to the present world; he seems so vital and alive in a casual moment caught and printed on a random piece of photographic paper, yet he is no longer here. What's next, then, for this photographic, digital overload We are still early into our adaptation to the digital world, and unsophisticated when it comes to managing all this material. We need to be more selective in what we choose to photograph and what we choose to keep. Delete is your friend. But the problem also needs technological recognition. Photo storage needs to be more automated, and photo-viewing software should also help us more. It can learn which photos we view most often, and let the poor photos recede automatically. Software could summarise the 10 best photos we've taken that month, and put them somewhere special. It could identify duplicate photos and suggest the one to keep. Don't back up all 3,000, just the 30 you really treasure. All we need is some bright spark to fix the problem. (c) 2013 Guardian Newspapers Limited. |