In the beginning…

Taking photos used to be a thoughtful hobby. With only a finite number of photos per roll of film, you had to carefully pick and choose what you shot. Photos were easily catalogued in albums so people had visual volumes of their families, travels, and milestones. These could then be picked up later and browsed, making it easy to go back and see how far you had come.

Today our process moves at a much more accelerated pace. With smartphones, we have cameras on us at all times, and we have the ability to take an infinite amount of photos (depending on your storage capabilities). No longer limited to 24 photos per roll or development time, we snap away, easily taking hundreds or thousands of photos over the course of a year. I actually don’t even remember the last time I had a photo “developed.” If there is a photo I deem worthy enough of a frame, I print it out. At home. On my photo printer. Instantly.

But what are we going to do with all our photos now? I’ve been thinking about this question over the past year as I watch friends have babies. Sure my Facebook feed may be inundated with their baby photos, but I know that for every 10 they post, they’ve probably taken 100. And they save most of those hundred; partly because they love their child and can’t bring themselves to delete them, and partly because no one has the time to sift through all those photos to delete the bad ones.

And by the time these babies are teenagers, how many photos will exist digitally of them? How will they sort through these, or share them with friends? I think about when I got married, and we put up some pictures of my husband and myself as babies, toddlers, kids, and teenagers. The task took some time to go through our multiple albums, but it was something that was completed in one evening. How will kids of today even begin to go through the photos their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc., have taken of them? That task doesn’t sound fun. It sounds daunting.

What I want, or rather what I think we need, is a smart, automated way to store and organize our photos. I know there are various apps and social networks that allow you to organize and share your photos like Carousel, Flayvr, Facebook, and Flickr. But I don’t like the idea of one more place, or multiple places, where I have to upload my photos. It feels like I’m adding a step to my process. I only want to focus on taking photos, not the boring task of organizing them.

So I started to think about iPhoto. In general, I like iPhoto. Like most Apple software, I feel like it’s easy and intuitive to use, and it fits right in with my workflow. My husband and I both have iPhones, and between us we have 2 laptops and a desktop computer, all Apple. So when I feel like backing up my photos, or organizing them, I use iPhoto.

iPhoto has some great features, but it’s not perfect. Any photo app will let you browse your photos in the chronological order you took them, but I like the event organization iPhoto offers in addition to this. I also like the Faces and Places features (facial recognition and geotagging features). But it’s not quite smart enough.

I want a photo app that does the organizing for me.

Here’s how I propose iPhoto could better allow for photo organization that’s sustainable over time and thousands of photos.

Intuitive Organization
At a most basic level we organize photos by chronology. That’s a no-brainer, it’s how iPhoto and other photo apps already work. But we also organize by events: Christmas 2013, Ryan’s 30th Birthday, Katie’s Graduation. iPhoto allows for event organization (in chronological order), but it still relies too much on my consistent input.

If I don’t name events, events are called “Untitled Event.” This requires me to name all my events, which is ok for certain things, but I want to choose when I name, or rename an event. I don’t want to have to go through 50 events and give them all a unique name, especially when some “events” aren’t even big enough to warrant being called that.

At a base level photos should be organized by year, broken up by season. This allows me to easily view photos from Winter 2013, which may contain images of a rare snow flurry in Austin, Hanukkah dinner, ice skating, and Christmas Eve/Day. It also uses the mental model we are used to when thinking about photo albums and scrapbooking. Then if I want to go in further and define or edit events, I can. But I don’t have to.

Which leads me to my next point…

Smart Events
Setting up parameters in iPhoto would also help the app know when I have events going on, so it can organize accordingly. Specifying information about my family and myself would let iPhoto know more about me to curate my events. Simple questions like, “Where do you live?”, “What holidays do you celebrate?”, and “When’s your anniversary?” can tell iPhoto when I might have events. If I chose Austin, TX, United States and checked boxes for Hanukkah, Christmas, and Easter, that right there is enough to curate about 10 holiday events. Items like New Year’s Eve, Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving could come from my current city location, while other denominational events could be chosen. And if no photos were taken on the dates of those holidays, no events would be created.

iPhoto should also hook into my calendar and look for any events I have scheduled that match up with the time stamp of photos to automatically create events. “Lulu & Wayne’s 50th Anniversary” in my calendar would create an event if I took photos on that day during that time frame.

And if you’re going to teach iPhoto the different faces of the people in your life, you might as well be able to input their birthdays too. Birthdays are difficult though because they are not always celebrated on the exact day. So the app should be smart enough to look within a ~5 day window for pictures of that person to know when to create their birthday event. If no face is found, no event is created.

Smart Locations
GPS information is already stored in the metadata of each image I take, so why not use it automatically? Yes, sometimes it is hard to pinpoint exactly where you are without your choosing (if I was at a food court of food trucks, how might you know I was specifically at the grilled cheese truck?), so that option needs to be there for input/editing. But if I was at Zilker Park, that is a large enough area the app should be able to know.

And certain geographical triggers should exist to help auto-generate events. If I was at Zilker Park taking pictures from 1pm — 3pm, iPhoto should know where I was, and create an event called “An Afternoon at the Park.”

Alternatively, if I start adding photos from New York City, iPhoto should know that I’m on a trip because I’ve specified the current city I live in as Austin, TX.

Object Recognition
Just like iPhoto can recognize faces it should also be able to recognize objects and animals. Anything from my German Shepherd (“Beardsley Photos”) to a baseball bat (“Matt’s Baseball Game”) to a graduation hat (“Emma’s Graduation”) could all, in theory, be objects used and recognized by iPhoto to create events automatically around the photos I add.

Timeline View
Being able to use all of the information above to create visual timelines for the people in our lives is another way to easily organize and view these photos. Facebook has the right idea, but I don’t want to publicize everything. Plus all the images that I would have to upload there (in yet another place) are all mixed in with status updates and other junk. I don’t have any kids but I see this as being such a cool tool to have to look back at your life or your child’s life (kind of like the “Dear Sophie” Google commercial from a few years back).

Bringing it Back

With these features, I could then browse all my photos easily from a high level, like 2014. Then I could drill down to Summer 2014, and see all my events and “loose” photos unattached to events from this summer so far: 4 Year Wedding Anniversary, An Afternoon at the Park, Fourth of July, a photo or two of Beardsley swimming in our neighbor’s pool.

It’s easy, took very little input, and would make my photo collection so much more manageable. And the best part is it gives me back more time to take more pictures.