Digital Home Thoughts: LIVEdigitally Asks a Good Question: 'Why Does Photo Sharing Still Suck?'

"I bought my first digital camera in the late 90s, it was a 1-megapixel Kodak that weighed about 14 pounds. I took terrible pictures onto my spacious 16MB compact flash card, which I copied onto my Toshiba Tecra (running Windows 98). The ~500K files had fun names like DCP0001.JPG, and I created folders named "Family" and "Vacations" and even created subfolders like "1997″ and "1998″. Every now and then I'd email a picture or two to a friend or family member, who would look at it in email, and promptly delete it. Printing a picture was generally a nuisance, and my best guess ratio of pictures taken to pictures printed was around 500:1."

A couple of weeks ago I was on the phone with my mother, trying to help her find some photos on her laptop. They had been there the previous day, but Photoshop Elements could no longer find them. In trying to solve her problem I found myself asking about her "workflow" and realized the absurdity of the situation. My mother is not a professional photographer. She's a retired schoolteacher who shouldn't have to worry about her "workflow." She just wants to take pictures, keep them safe, share them, and be able to find them when she needs them.

This blog posting over on LIVEdigitally raises some interesting points about the state of consumer digital photography. Much more than just discussing photo sharing, it hits at larger issues. Like the fact that even with the massive leaps in digital camera and image quality since the late 1990's were still dealing with meaningless file names. Or the lack of decent standards for tagging photos. Not to mention the fact that there really isn't a good way to digitally share photos. There may be pieces of solutions here and there, but where's the simplicity?