For the Photographer in You - Indoor Models!!!
If you didn't snap it…it didn't happen! Is that the thought our narcissistic tendencies have created in the digital photography world? We consume events by quickly pulling out our phone and requesting the subjects 'look this way' and snap..there it is, forever changed and artificially captured. For any scientists out there….writing this reminds me of something I learnt in school where some experiments can only be performed through an interaction and the interaction will inevitably change the properties of the observation! Boo ya! There it is…our event is changed!
Anyway…I am getting off topic. My point from the above paragraph is that we have a huge number of snaps that sit on our digital devices, often never looked at again and certainly to be lost in the depths of our hard drive maze!
One of my New Year resolutions is to use more of my own personal images…share them, look at them, print them…comment on them with others!!! But how can we do that if it is so difficult to find anything!
I have done a little bit of research into this and one name kept popping up…Shoebox. It launched in 2012 across all platforms - mac, android, IOS. Photo organization has to be based on the data captured and then interpreted when we take a photo…i.e. automatic. Lets face it, who has time to organize and categories photos! You would be amazed by the amount of data captured with your humble snapshot…date, time, camera, exposure info, GPS location. What is developing at great pace now, is the ability to recognize what is in a photo and categorizing based on the findings. You can't believe how difficult this is for a computer...even a 2 year old can recognize an elephant!! Kids take about 1 picture every 200 milliseconds. If you'd like to learn a bit more about how computers are developing in this field listen to this ted talk from Fei Fei Li - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40riCqvRoMs - see the images below from the talk....the computer could recognize the objects in the busy photo and the make and model of the car, but made a bit of a mistake with the third image :-) Image just how useful for organizing photos this is going to be!!! YAY, help is on the way.
I tried out the shoebox app - Storing low resolution files is free and if you want to store high resolution original files its just $5 per month. You can use any of the stored data associated with your files to search, but it doesn't do any facial recognition….yet!
How did I get on? You'll just have to check back in February!!
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