Thursday, December 06, 2007 Ng: Wired Desktop no. 776 By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
I REMEMBER sometime ago, when we had a company excursion, that we ended up with thousands of pictures. After all, everybody had a digital camera, and was clicking left and right. Of course, that is legions more than what we normally have and the reason is simple – digital pictures are free.
In fact, many of my colleagues routinely take three to eight shots per pose.
Not only more shots per pose, but more shots for many insignificant poses. If you take a look at blogs around the Internet, you will see some people who take pictures of the food they eat if they think it has good presentation!
Of course, sooner or later, no matter how big your hard disk is, it will be filled up. I probably now have somewhere over 20,000 pictures over different computers, disks and CDs.
So many pictures, but so little time to organize it. What happens? You have photo overload, much like you have information overload. Similar to having loads and loads of data but no relevant information, we have mountains of photos but no way to find the good ones.
There was a time when somebody asked for a solo portrait picture of me but I did not know where to get one that is good enough. I do have, however, hundreds or thousands of poorly posed or poorly taken photos, with a host of other people in various kinds of poses.
I started organizing and found so many pictures in different events that were missing. They were all in different computers, some of which were already retired. I guess, when you see your hard disk filling up, you start deleting files in haste and probably some data and photos which you thought you had back up somewhere are gone forever. Or when your hard disk crashes and you were not able to archive, some nice photos are gone forever.
I decided to create a server to store pictures, and started organizing photos and sharing these with friends. It is in www.itsngenius.com/photos and since it has more than enough space for over a million photos, I decided to offer it for free to friends and customers. Pretty soon, traffic started building up.
In fact, photo galleries are among the most popular web sites. They say that in Facebook and Flickr alone, there are hundreds of millions of photos, with over a million uploaded every day.
Anyhow, I also found that keeping photos on the web and sharing them is not only nice, but also helps one make friends. Many customers also find it a good service, and therefore a good way to build your brand as well. For now, we are offering the site for free and, in fact, we just recently launched a photo contest (which we will be doing regularly in the next few weeks), in which people can choose and comment on pictures as well as rate it.
Talk about democracy! One thing technology has enabled us to do easier is to hold democratic discussions or ask people to freely vote on things, including which is the better picture!
It is still on trial stage but it has been getting good response, and I look forward to your comments.
I read how George Eastman, over a hundred years ago, revolutionized photography by offering better ways to take pictures and cheaper ways to develop them. More and more people have taken interest in photography because of the power and affordability it now gives. This is definitely one way to live the digital life!
