[Sigia-l] organizing pictures

[Listera]

"Peter VanDijck" wrote:

> How do you organize your digital pictures? Pros and cons?

This is really two problems in one: storage and display.

The current trend is that storage will be opaque to the user and the display
will be infinitely configurable. I've written about this a bit previously,
but the trend is to decouple the two. Apple is doing just that with music
files in iTunes, photos in iPhoto and code snippets in XCode. Microsoft is
planning something similar for the upcoming Longerhorn.

The idea is to let the app/OS do the file storage management in somewhat of
an opaque manner so the user doesn't know/care where the files are and how
they are arranged. The app/OS abstracts that and not only gives the user
total flexibility to create arbitrary organizations based on that
abstraction, but also the ability to create "smart sets" where relatively
simple "rules" define what actually goes into a folder/set/group/etc
dynamically.

In other words, as soon as you import a song into iTunes, it may
automatically get listed in smart sets called "60's music" and "Blues" and
"Acoustic" all at once. Metadata from the digital camera may do similar
things. A photo may belong to a date-based smart set because of the *time*
it was imported (X-Mas) but maybe also get listed in a smart set indicating
*location* from camera data.

You might be saying, "I ain't no vegetarian and I don't use crap like
iPhoto. What do I do?" Well then, you might be solving yesteryear's problem.
:-)

The developers at Apple I spoke with did usability studies on this, and,
just as you figured it out, rigid categories, date-based or not, are not the
most intuitive thing for the average user and do not scale well. In fact,
the whole file/folder organization is suspect and is scheduled for a massive
change on the desktop, on the presentation side.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba