Organising photographs: when, where and who?
Generally speaking, people like to organise their photographs according to three factors: when, where and who. I still remember my mother’s tiny shoe boxes and albums “Iacovos Birthday (1995)”, “Persea’s birth” , “Trip to Troodo’s mountains (1998)”, “Our wedding” and so on … OK guys, the last one is huge, and I mean huuuuge 
Anyway, 90s have past and most of us stopped organising photographs in shoe boxes or traditional albums, a lot of years ago. In contrast, we try to organise them in hard disks and in related web services, such as Flickr. But how do those services help us to organise our photographs? Or, maybe, they do not?
When?
Digital cameras are clever enough to record and store a photography’s shoot time. Flickr uses that property to produce photo archives. However, when I come back in a year I won’t remember when I had that visit to Ashton Memorial. In fact, I find it hard to remember even now.
It would be nice, if we were able to place events on archives, such as on calendar applications. For example, I could mark that in October 28th I had a “Visit to Ashton Memorial with Andria and Andreas”. Besides, Flickr based on that information could create automatically a photoset as iPhoto does and a timeline, which will include all the events in chronological order.
Where?
Flickr geotagged photos is a possible answer to this question. As far as I know, Picassa supports geotagging with Google Earth, as well. However, since GPS enabled cameras are available already, there are a lot more to be taken under consideration. What about marking a place with something more familiar to us, for example “Marios’s house” , instead of plain longitude and latitude values.
Who?
Probably the most interesting and tough part. But there is some light on the horizon: Google supports that upcoming versions of Picasa software will support face and object recognition, among others features.
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Nice ideas. The data collection isn’t that hard nowadays.
The key problem with the implementation tho, is the user interface. What bothers me most, is how the programmer will display this massive stream of information to the user, in a way that will be efficient.
Thank you Andreas. You are right, it is not hard to collect or save data in our days. The difficult part is to interpret and convert those data into useful and meaningful information.
Regarding the user interface issue: information does not have to be explicitly stated, it can be indirectly stated as well. Sometimes the latter is more informative, despite the fact that programmers do not recognise it. What I am proposing here is an improved way of organising and therefore browsing our photographs.
Consider the following scenario: I have take a few photos on June 2005, in Namibia. What does that mean to you? Why did I travel to Namibia? How long did I stay there? Where Namibia is after all? If the answers of those questions are purely printed below the photo no one will bother to read them. But if you are browsing my photostream through a combination of a map and a timeline, then you will know that last summer I have travelled to Namibia, a country located in South Africa (even if you are not really interested in that kind of information).
I have more to add but I will come back later with another post!
Take a look on Google’s Picassa 2. It offers pretty good organizing methods..for you and your peers. I really like the ‘Timeline’ and the ‘Slideshow’ features. This might solve a couple of your problems (:
Thank you Marios. I have tried Picassa 2 and I am quite impressed by its features. However, I was sad to find out that you can not specify a range of days for smart albums. Anyway, I guess that things could become better for upcoming versions.
By the way, I have noticed that smart photosets is a popular and common request among other Flickr ideas. Good news, huh?