Opinion: The rapid pace of evolution in the digital camera market is creating problems for professional content creators and consumers alike. The trouble is much more than storage, preservation and data lifecycle and may require a paradigm shift byDigital imaging is currently topping the list of major preoccupations for IT decision makers in design and publishing. Why? Simple: The problems involved with this technology are evolving significantly faster than the available solutions. Cameras continue to evolve very rapidly, and so have the usage patterns of consumers and professionals alike.
For example, the average consumer, just having fun taking pictures with his or her digital camera, will likely have tens or even hundreds of thousands of pictures to manage in a few years time. For a professional, used to taking more images on higher-resolution camera, that could come to many terabytes of data.
So, how will consumers or IT managers in an enterprise manage this content? Even more important: what are the unforeseen problems linked to this explosion of images? Can we even image the ripple effect of these changes?
The most common solution for this issue is to manage the pictures using a digital asset management system. And there is no lack of programs that offer to solve this problem, ranging in price from virtually free to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
While there are some excellent tools out there to manage images, they don't solve the real problem: too many pictures.
On every level of the market, we now create at least ten to fifteen times more pictures than before. We are already drowning in pictures today—and this is without the cumulative effect of this digital imaging evolution over time.
It is not unreasonable to expect that a professional photographer, snapping away with a digital SLR camera, will have accumulated half a million pictures or more in a few years. How on earth can he or she deal with this data? And how will the average consumer deal with the perhaps 50,000 pictures taken during the same period, on an increasing number of more-or-less compatible devices? By adding keywords and meta-data manually? I don't think so.
This explosion of pictures is already creating significant ripple effects in the design and publishing industry today: The digital image clutter is starting to seriously challenge network bandwidth, server capacity and local storage needs.
At the same time, workflow problems linked to digital imaging keep surfacing. The move from analog to digital photography has triggered significant shifts in competencies within organizations and is perturbing already-complex publishing workflows.
Finally, there are the changes in data formats: RAW files (which record the totality of data captured by an image sensor) are now so popular that they are even supported by consumer-level image databases. However, these RAW files require more-complex handling than standard image file formats.
In short, there can be little surprise that for technology decision makers in design and publishing, digital imaging ranges very high on the shortlist of major preoccupations.
Next Page: Calling all paradigm shifts.
In fact, what is happening is quite simple: In digital photography, user adoption has evolved much faster than the accompanying technology, and much, much faster than the usage patterns that should allow us to deal with this onslaught of pictures. Basically, we have no idea what is hitting us—but that doesn't stop us from taking pictures. And we are just at the beginning of an exponential curve.
This strange evolution is increasingly leading to a void between what pictures have become for us, the problems that they bring and the tools at our disposal to cope with them. Even the much-vaunted, new search technologies will be helpless to find an image if we have not provided any metadata.
For the average user, adding metadata is ridiculously complicated, not necessarily because of our tools, but because we have no previous experience in how to do these things in an efficient way.
Since the boom of the Internet, no single technology has evolved as spectacularly as digital imaging. And we are only at the beginning: We have no idea how this new force will inspire technology providers.
There is already a significant effort deployed in shape and pattern recognition algorithms, allowing users, for instance, to find all portraits in a group of pictures. But a significant part of dealing with images will have to do with automatic meta-data generation.
Here are a couple of other suggestions for the industry:
Camera manufacturers might build GPS receivers into their cameras. This would allow the camera to know where a picture is taken—and make it much easier for the user to find shots by location without manual tagging.
Computers might start tagging images automatically at import in a much more-sophisticated way than we can imagine today, just by intelligently applying available data on user preferences. The key here will be not so much in how to do it, but for the search engine to become smarter in figuring out which information users might be interested in preserving. For example, the software might allow you to sort your image collection by the people you have sent them to.
But even beyond these relatively obvious ideas, there is room for major innovation, indeed for a genuine paradigm shift. The longer this evolution continues, the stronger the need for a drastic solution, for some really smart new way of dealing with images.
What we will need, sooner or later, is a new paradigm for integrating digital images into our lives. By pushing it a little bit, one could just imagine an operating system for images. Or some other new paradigm or device for images we can not imagine today.
It will happen. Just wait and see.
Andreas Pfeiffer is founder of The Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies.
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