Link: O’Reilly: A Quick Guide to Digital Shoeboxes.
For many consumers, just mentioning words like media management is enough to send them running away screaming. These are the people who have bought digicams because they’re cheap and easy; they may well have given no consideration to managing their photos in any meaningful manner.
This is a pity, because unless the digicam generation takes some action now to make proper, useful photo archives, it is going to be in something of a muddle in 30 years’ time, when it collectively tries to relive its younger days and finds that nothing is labeled or captioned properly.
Gil is right – the apps he describes here are digital shoeboxes. But digital shoeboxes are the equivalent of getting your folder of photos and either throwing them into a showbox or putting them all into an album, organized by roll of film.
What people really need is some way to go beyond that, more like a digital scrapbook. A digital scrapbook (or multimedia diary) is one of the design drivers for Lifeblog. A scrapbook adds context to the photos.
