Digital Home Thoughts: Fotonauts: Wikipedia for Photos?

"An estimated 500 million images are captured every day, but less than 5 percent end up on major photo sharing sites...The former CTO of NeXT and Apple's application division, Hullot showed off fotonauts,a kind of Wikipedia for photos at TechCrunch50. Currently in private beta for Windows and Mac users, the Web application stores 1080p thumbnails of photos from major services and provides synchronization of photos across multiple services. As a result, fotonauts allows users to share, remix and reuse and enrich images across multiple services, Hullot said. Fotonauts includes an event stream for people or albums a user is following, and a drag and drop facility for moving image into different albums."

Fotonauts aims to solve a very real problem: how do we find relevant images? Right now most of us probably go to Google, type in what we're looking for, and switch to the image tab. That tends to work pretty well, but Google is only able to tap into a fraction of the images that are out there. If there was a way for me to pull in images from Smugmug and add rich data to them, I think I'd do it. The big challenge for Fotonauts will probably be the same challenge faced by most online photo sharing sites: pornography. Unless they can find a way to keep it clean, the value of it as a service will go way down. After the break, there's a video worth checking out if you want to see Fotonauts in action - though you'll want to crank your Universal Translator to 11 because the presenter has a thick accent that's somewhat hard to decode.