Too Many Photos, So Little Time
I have always liked this photo by the artist Erik Kessels who made an art installation called 24 Hours Of Photos. One million photos were printed to represent the number of photos uploaded to Flickr in a single day in 2011. Mountains, valleys and riverbeds of photos to wander around in. I like the physicality and serendipity of that. If the artist were making that image again in 2016, I suspect it would be much different, almost certainly less dreamy and poetic.
Photos have always been both ephemeral and cherished objects. In the film era, you could easily riffle through a drawer or shoebox to find what you were looking for. In the 1960’s people took about 150 photos per year, so that browsing method was still feasible. In 2015, with mobile phone cameras with us all the time, consumers are taking on average 2k — 3k per year. While most of us will never have the volume of photos in the Erik Kessels’ image, there is a pile up happening and few good ways to deal with it.
Over the last several months I have been building with my team a personal photo product called Yarn, not only to rescue our photo collections from being lost by the ever growing numbers that are being added each year, but also to bring back the enjoyment that we feel when we re-discover our personal photo moments through serendipity.
While social photography has added great enjoyment to all of our lives and daily cues to take actions with photos, almost no one posts all of their photos to social channels. So what are we to do with the remaining photos that hold perhaps even greater personal memory value for us? Where do we start to browse and where are the regular cues in our personal collections?
In trying to address these ideas related to what we understand as the human photo values of discover, remember, share, the Yarn team arrived at our 3 guiding principles for building a new generation of the personal photo experience:
- Instead of users having to go to their photos, their photos must come to them, automatically grouped in many different ways: people, time, topic, place, color … to name a few. Users never have to know where to start, because Yarn can jump start the process for them.
- Photos are a form of extended personal memory, so deliver a “remembering” experience that surprises, delights and moves. There are few things as memory jogging as our photos — make sure the experience of remembering keeps its human touch.
- No one has time or patience to organize their photos, so provide users with actions that are not “tasks”, but that nonetheless lead to incremental organization as a by-product.
We deliver these product values in the Yarn iOS & Android apps. Through our signature feature, the Yarn Feed, users can discover their memories in a stream of automatically collaged photos from the different times and places of life. A Daily Yarn jumps starts the process, but we find that Yarn users express the most delight when they just keep tapping the New Yarn button to get new collages on-demand. You just never know “what’s next” … and that is most of the fun!
Remembering the past is a little like daydreaming or moving from one idea to the next without really thinking where it will lead. Why not roam around your photos in the same way?
Note: Since publishing this post Yarn has been discontinued as a photo service. Read our story here.
