They say, that the only thing that cannot be replaced when your house is burning (or lately we can say, getting flooded) is your old shoebox full of pictures. Preserving these memories is harder in when everything is one a little aluminium disk spinning inside your computer or is backed up on really cheap free after rebate CD-Rs or unprofitable web photo startups. Rest assured, this topic will be given a lot of attention in this blog.
The folks at the O'Reilly network recently launched a "Digital Media Center" and have this nice article on Digital Shoeboxes.
Digital photos are, in theory, easier to share with people because they can be flung so easily from one computing device to another. So I find it even more of a shame when I encounter people (and with the rapid rise of interest in digital photography, there are more of them every day) who treat their digital shots the same way they used to treat their prints: rather than languishing in a drawer, the pictures languish on a hard disk. They still don't get to see the light of day.
If you're one of these photographers, or (more likely) you know someone with this shameful habit, this article is for you.
1. It is very nice to have an application allowing you to easily tag your photos, but if the metadata are stored in some obscure format specific to the app it is useless as it is sure the application won't be existing anymore in 30 years.
XML probably, or at least some text format. Or is there a standard?
Posted at 6:25AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Vincent Oberle