Why is it so Hard to Write a Good Photo Organization App?
Yes Isak, I stole your title.
It’s time once again for the annual printed Wild Garden Seed catalog. This means pictures. And that means we need to find the pictures. And that means they need to be organized.
Applications like Picasa, F-Spot, iPhoto, and even Flickr do a pretty decent job of making your photos somewhat organized. You can tag/label/add keywords, put the photos to sets/albums/galleries, make screensavers, and burn CDs, but you can’t keep your photo collection on removable media (read: CDs/DVDs). I don’t know if this is just a case of “it’s hard”, or if the target user doesn’t need that feature. Most applications would work fine for the normal person who wants to take pictures and then find all the pictures of their dog to put on their Christmas card.
The fabled Joe Average takes at most a 1GB or 2 of photos a year. Most new computers can easily store this amount of data for years without running out of room. The problem comes with professional photographers, who might take 2GB in a month (that’s about 22/day at 3MB/photo, which is what some of the higher end cameras take). The average computer could maybe store 2 or 3 years of photos at a stretch. After that, what do you do? Buy a bigger HDD and reinstall Windows? Get an external 300GB HDD to keep everything on? What about laptops, who always are limited for storage? I suppose if you’re a large stock art company or magazine you could setup iSCSI or ATA-Over-Ethernet, but most photographers don’t have unlimited IT budgets and full time geeks on payroll.
I can only guess that the solution most people turn to is removable media like CDs and DVDs. We used Picasa to choose photos for the catalog, it was a nice piece of software, and worked surprisingly well. First, though, we had to manually look at each CD, writing down the ones we wanted, and then copying them to the hard drive for Picasa to manage. That was a pain. It would have been a lot easier to tag each photo as “lettuce” or “spider” when it was downloaded from the camera. Then, when you entered “spinach” into the search, all your images on your CDs would automatically be listed. Wouldn’t that be cool?
Of course, maybe I missed something really basic. Maybe F-Spot or Picasa already do this and I just wasted a bunch of time. I really hope so, because that would be great! But I’m afraid probably not. Which means I need to write another piece of software, or patch F-Spot, which might not be a bad idea.
Like Isak said in his post, I sound ungrateful too. I should write a patch. Hopefully I will. Soon.
January 14th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Heh, I know what you mean. I’ve been frustrated with photo management apps too, although not to the same extent as with audio apps
I’ve also settled for Picasa, but the fact that it isn’t integrated in linux enough will probably force me to switch to something more GNOME-ish sooner or later… I mean, stuff like “oh, I want to open this image in GIMP to do some editing” is extremely hard in Picasa.
It’s excelent for browsing/viewing/fixing red eyes though