Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

« Animatronic bees || Back to Blog | Dayglo Future »

February 22, 2004

On the road, looking for photos

I'll be on the road through Wednesday, researching an article for Wired on how we end-users are going to find the snapshots we're looking for when we each have 25,000+ photos on our desktops.

I'm leaving tonight to visit Corbis on Monday. They have a few million photos, so they've given this issue some thought. I'm particularly interested in how they create and manage the taxonomies and other metadata.

Then, after traveling all day Tuesday, I'll spend most of Wednesday in the Iron Mountain hole in the ground where Corbis stores its prints and negatives.

The article is not about Corbis, though. Corbis, I hope, will give a way into some of the issues. I've already spoken with a bunch o' folks about what's going on in this field. If you know of someone I should talk with about how we're going to manage the oceans of digital photos we'll be storing, let me know...

Posted by D. Weinberger at February 22, 2004 11:53 AM


TrackBack

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference On the road, looking for photos:

» The Ubiquity Of Photographs from memoria technica
It used to be the case that only the most prestigious of events were captured in photographs, such was the scarcity of the technology required. Today you can pick up cameras for pocket money and digital cameras enable a freedom... [Read More]

Tracked on February 23, 2004 04:01 PM

» Good question... from jordoncooper.com
David Weinberger is asking what are going to do about the amount of digital images we are taking and storing on our desktops. Good questions, I hope he finds some answers! [Read More]

Tracked on February 23, 2004 11:32 PM

Comments

Facial recognition and item/place recognition based on previously defined images as master references.

Add in date based coordination to calendars of vacation or trip events.

It's all about auto-generation of metadata.

Posted by: Michael | February 22, 2004 01:39 PM


I haven't been in touch with anyone there recently, but you might want to talk to the folks at The Workbook, my old employers. They're the small guys in the field who don't have Corbis and Getty's resources. You probably want to talk to Doug Dawirs, and his contact info can be found here. Tell 'em I said hi.

Posted by: Dori | February 22, 2004 06:17 PM


You just need to organize them by colour!

Posted by: Trevor Bechtel | February 22, 2004 08:00 PM


In camera GPS, now you're talking.

Posted by: Gary Turner | February 23, 2004 03:45 AM


Did you consider Microsoft Research's MyLifeBits? Photos are a subset of the information being archived/organized in this project.

Posted by: Bernhard Seefeld | February 26, 2004 12:35 PM


Bernhard, yes, I've been talking with Microsoft to set up an interview about MyLifeBits and other research they have underway. Thanks for the tip, though.

Posted by: David Weinberger | February 26, 2004 03:34 PM


Post a comment

Guidelines for Commenting

Basically, you can say what you want. (Click here for the fine print.)

If you haven't left a comment here before, your comment may be put into a queue for me to approve. Sorry for the delay. Blame the damn spammers.