6 ms·

Photography is changing

92 points by bpierre 10y ago

misnome 10y ago
"Apple doesn't support my personal use case well, therefore they dont understand photography" Lots of people DO want to organise photos from trips and events, and evidence shows that those people (who are probably a much larger sample than the author) are happy. Anecdotally, I have several relatives who are extremely happy - to the extent of regularly making photo books from trips. Everyone else I know who do "Serious" photography use Lightroom, and don't touch Apple's Photo organiser. The history of browsing on my phone is enough.
- fennecfoxen 10y ago
  I use Lightroom as well. Normally that means I'm using a good camera, too, but I offload the iPhone pictures too and filtering out the stupid receipts (etc) is a problem there too.
- denzil_correa 10y ago
  > "Apple doesn't support my personal use case well, therefore they dont understand photography" Pretty much comes across as this. It would have come across as much better IF the author would have positioned this as - there is a shift in the landscape of the "average case" photography and if Apple recognizes it, it could be a game changer.
- phaed 10y ago
  The contrarian will always lose sight of the forest for the trees, this goes both ways.
- rm999 10y ago
  From the context of the article I don't think the author is proposing removing the default "vacation" functionality of grouping photos by time/location; that could just be one of many modes (e.g. spending several days in a location outside your usual location = auto-group together in an album). This behavior detection is totally possible with simple rules, or modern machine learning. It's one of those ideas that totally makes sense in retrospect. I like the article a lot.
  - mercer 10y ago
    It shouldn't even be too difficult to create separate albums/streams for things like 'closeups' or 'labels/bills'.
- hrktb 10y ago
  The point was not that events shouldn't be organized, more that they are occasional and other camera use are as important. You are right that some people don't care about better intelligence, but the response to Google Photos is big enough to also show that having a huge engine to work with one's photo is valuable. Being able to do searches like 'receipt' or 'ikea' or 'parking' and have actually relevant results is both mind blowing and extremely convenient, and I haven't heard of anyone who didn't wish Apple would have even half of the feature Google photos have after trying it for a few days. I also made the jump and the device's photo library has become a mere backup of my photos. Going further, I agree with the author that if quick (or even auto) tagging of photo was easier it would help a lot. Btw, I don't know how much Lightroom improved on iOS, but it always felt like a hassle to get photos into it. The same could be said for desktop version. I'd select a few important shots and do whatever it takes to have them in Lightroom, but there's no way I'd use that as my primary photo manager, and I feel that those "serious" people also have a different managing system that doesn't rely on Lightroom (I remember articles about pros manually filtering in folders and backups before even starting lightroom)
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >The point was not that events shouldn't be organized, more that they are occasional and other camera use are as important. Which is wrong. Far more people take vacations photos, selfies, events (birthdays, out with friends), kids, pets and food shots, than shoot their receipts or use their camera as a magnifying glass (taking a picture and zooming in to read something). And yet, he puts those outlier usages at 99% of camera use, saying that the regular selfie/vacation/kids/etc photos are "1% of photography. On which I call BS.
    - sdenton4 10y ago
      How often do you get a receipt, and hope often do you go on trips? Really it seems like the camera app should feed out new photos to other apps, like the receipt organizing app, to decide whether it's a relevant image or not, and act accordingly. Put the smarts in there downstream apps, not there cameras app...
iiiggglll 10y ago
I think that both major mobile platforms need to revamp their photo flows to adapt to all the buckets mentioned in this article, along with a "private" bucket for things like naked photos and other pictures not everyone would want automatically "shared" onto a feed (Apple has dipped a toe in this water with the "hidden" flag on photos, but there is still a long way to go). And while I'm wishing, I would hope that they do all this while still allowing for automatic cloud storage and backup without compromising privacy. It seems one of the main reasons Snapchat is so successful is that it provides a flow for photos and other communication that isn't the traditional "single stream that also doubles a permanent and mostly public record" style of organization. It seems inevitable that iOS & Android will both have to eventually adjust their built-in camera & photo handling apps to acknowledge the realties of how people actually use their devices in this regard.
cjbprime 10y ago
There's some hubris in declaring that one company's disinterest in your wacky unproven unimplemented camera app idea results in them not understanding photography.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
> A year from now nobody will care about what I did at 9:06 AM while waiting in line at the coffee bar. I care what I did a year ago. I'm unlikely to look back at it, realistically, but throwing away little bits of history about myself doesn't appeal to me.
- misnome 10y ago
  This, and an "Automatically delete photos after X time" is simply a massive recipe for disaster, even if you layer it behind several explicit tagging actions. Even assuming it is bug free, how long before the first massively popular "Apple deleted all my [super important event X] shots".
furyofantares 10y ago
> A year from now nobody will care about what I did at 9:06 AM while waiting in line at the coffee bar. In 15 years you might, though! When I read chat logs from 15 years ago, a lot is mundane, but a lot either serves as a wonderful memory trigger or is a completely alien artifact from a person I don't remember being, and I don't believe I could have guessed in advance which chats would end up in which category. I expect the same will be true of photography.
- copperx 10y ago
  That a great point which is missed by so many technologists. It's impossible to know if what you created today will be important later, be it a photo, a blog post, a voice recording, or an email. I've found invaluable emails in my Gmail inbox written a decade ago. Maybe that silly snapchat pic you took today with your cousin is the last picture you'll have of her. Who knows.
- dzmien 10y ago
  Agreed. I have tens of thousands of digital photos from the past 12 years of my life, all of which I uploaded to Google's online photo service. It has the cool ability to search for pictures based on content (e.g. sunsets, dogs, specific people, among many other things) and it is organized by date. I love looking back on my life in pictures. Even the most mundane photos can stir up delightful memories. With massive amounts of storage available on the cheap, I rarely delete photos.
- coldtea 10y ago
  Exactly. Nobody cares even now what you did at "9:06 AM while waiting in line at the coffee bar" -- regardless of whether such photos get Likes or not. But you, and others persons in the photos, might care.
542458 10y ago
I get what he's saying. My phone has a whole whack of note-pictures of addresses, price tags, and slides from other people's presentations. However, I'm not sure auto detecting them does any good. Context (context that my phone doesn't know) really matters. A photo of a street sign might be a reminder of where I parked, or it might be a more traditional memorabilia photo because the street had an amusing name. If the street sign picture is categorized and behaves in the same way as the rest of my photos it's easy for me to find and manage. If pictures of street signs all of a sudden gain a new set of rules different from the rest of my pictures they're suddenly harder to manage. Worse still is if a memorabilia-picture is miscategorized as a note-picture or vice versa. I feel that this would be very confusing for many people.
Someone 10y ago
"I showed my girlfriend some tiny text on the back of a credit card. Without hesitating she pulled out her camera, took a photo, and then zoomed in on the photo to read the text." Not the best example of not understanding it users. iOS 10 will have a magnifier that handles exactly this use case (http://9to5mac.com/2016/06/15/accessibility-ios-10-macos-appletv-watch/ http://9to5mac.com/2016/06/15/accessibility-ios-10-macos-app...)
- barrkel 10y ago
  A photo is still better because the object doesn't need to be kept still while the phone is pointed at it for the entire time the small details are being examined.
  - Someone 10y ago
    "The magnifier UI gives you access to the camera flash, and the ability to lock focus and grab a freeze frame." And yes, the freeze frame is at full camera resolution, so that you can zoom in.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    They already thought of that. You would be able to freeze the item.
ansgri 10y ago
Strange they haven't mentioned the abundance of 'mobile scanner' apps, of which my favourite (and slightly affiliated) app is Smart PDF/A Scanner [0], which can work with any aspect ratio and has auto-normalization that makes text readable and printable. It also can be configured to send PDF as e-mail only to avoid cluttering the photo stream. [0] http://smartengines.biz/products/smart-pdfa-scanner/ http://smartengines.biz/products/smart-pdfa-scanner/
rbosinger 10y ago
Those are all really good ideas.
mc32 10y ago
Too bad Flickr never came out with a camera app. Tied in to their original uploader that would have been a pretty nice combination.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I suspect a lot of it was the result of Flickr having always been more oriented toward users with actual cameras who would do processing on their photos prior to uploading them. Not sure the degree to which that use case mirrored the actual one but Flickr was probably never all that focused on having users upload directly from their cameras.
  - niftich 10y ago
    This. Flickr was always closer to deviantART / 500px and going after the 'carefully composed photo for its own merits' market than the casual photo sharing space.
    - mc32 10y ago
      Yes, there were and are many groups like that with curated content. But the great majority are photo buckets with no curation. That said, it was always "social". People made do with the tools Flickr gave them. But the tools were left to wither and were never updated or given finesse knobs. Then, when "good" phone cameras became mainstream[1] Flickr didn't take that and run with it to accommodate its users who were now using their camera phones as either their main cameras or at least took a good chunk of their pictures. One reason Flickr continues is it has a core of dedicated users, some of whom have tried alternatives but who come back because the others have very few tools for photographers to use (by tools I mean ways to organize, comment, tag, favorite, curate, groups, galleries, pool, moderate, etc. [1] The NYT's Damon Winter's getting recognition on photos taken with an iPhone in 2010 should have been the aha moment, but it wasn't: See http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-tool-to-tell-a-war-story/ http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-t...
      - 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
BadassFractal 10y ago
Speaking of photography, I haven't seen much in terms of new services or opportunities for photographers made available through technology in the past few years. Where's all the innovation in this field? Is the medium dying out? Instagram gave photographers a hugely popular new avenue to show their work, although it does shrink your 50mb asset to a crappy thumbnail. It's hard to stand out, very similarly to the App Store. 500px is pretty neat, but it's mostly an echo chamber for photographers, the public is elsewhere. Cameras are mostly the same over the years, just better and faster. Mirrorless is cool, but not necessarily game changing. Seems like a very static industry. We've all done the same HDR shots thousands of times from every conceivable angle of every conceivable object and person, it's getting stale. I suspect that most photographers will have to move into video sooner or later, as that is a lot more engaging for the masses, and still photos will be like black and white photography, mostly relegated to high art and academia. One avenue I can see happening down the line is that all of our assets and editing will eventually be in the cloud, a la Google Docs. Right now the only issue is the size and quantity of assets, which is orders of magnitude higher than text files, but we'll get there.
- ghaff 10y ago
  >I suspect that most photographers will have to move into video sooner or later, as that is a lot more engaging for the masses, and still photos will be like black and white photography, mostly relegated to high art and academia. I suppose it depends on what you mean by "photographers will have to move." The tools for creating decent video today are so good and so relatively cheap. But creating video that is in any real sense professional (including the professional of 20 years ago) takes an amount of time and effort that just isn't justified in most circumstances. By contrast, very high-quality stills are ubiquitous. Sure, the sweet spots could shift and handheld video with ambient lighting will beat quality stills for most uses but that hasn't happened yet.
therealmarv 10y ago
Hopefully somebody from Google Photos team will read that (because I don't have an iPhone)
misnome 10y ago
As an aside I'd be interested in hearing why the article title was changed here - I thought it was explicit policy to almost always have the actual article titles?
- dang 10y ago
  Please see the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. This one was both, so the guidelines mandated changing it. We changed it to a phrase from the article that seemed to more accurately and neutral describe its point.
  - misnome 10y ago
    Interesting; although it appears as linkbait on initially reading the title, I'd argue that the articles central thrust is accurately represented by its original title - therefore counting as neither (using a definition of linkbait as a title to drive clicks that is not representative of the article). The article isn't arguing just that photography is changing, but that Apple is stuck in "The past".
    - dang 10y ago
      We don't always pick the best replacement titles; "Apple doesn’t understand photography" is such outrageous clickbait that perhaps we overcompensated. I don't think "Apple is stuck in the past" would be much better, but if you want to suggest an accurate, neutral title, we'd be happy to change it again.

92 points by bpierre 10y ago

"Apple doesn't support my personal use case well, therefore they dont understand photography" Lots of people DO want to organise photos from trips and events, and evidence shows that those people (who are probably a much larger sample than the author) are happy. Anecdotally, I have several relatives who are extremely happy - to the extent of regularly making photo books from trips. Everyone else I know who do "Serious" photography use Lightroom, and don't touch Apple's Photo organiser. The history of browsing on my phone is enough.

fennecfoxen 10y ago
I use Lightroom as well. Normally that means I'm using a good camera, too, but I offload the iPhone pictures too and filtering out the stupid receipts (etc) is a problem there too.
denzil_correa 10y ago
> "Apple doesn't support my personal use case well, therefore they dont understand photography" Pretty much comes across as this. It would have come across as much better IF the author would have positioned this as - there is a shift in the landscape of the "average case" photography and if Apple recognizes it, it could be a game changer.
phaed 10y ago
The contrarian will always lose sight of the forest for the trees, this goes both ways.
rm999 10y ago
From the context of the article I don't think the author is proposing removing the default "vacation" functionality of grouping photos by time/location; that could just be one of many modes (e.g. spending several days in a location outside your usual location = auto-group together in an album). This behavior detection is totally possible with simple rules, or modern machine learning. It's one of those ideas that totally makes sense in retrospect. I like the article a lot.
- mercer 10y ago
  It shouldn't even be too difficult to create separate albums/streams for things like 'closeups' or 'labels/bills'.
hrktb 10y ago
The point was not that events shouldn't be organized, more that they are occasional and other camera use are as important. You are right that some people don't care about better intelligence, but the response to Google Photos is big enough to also show that having a huge engine to work with one's photo is valuable. Being able to do searches like 'receipt' or 'ikea' or 'parking' and have actually relevant results is both mind blowing and extremely convenient, and I haven't heard of anyone who didn't wish Apple would have even half of the feature Google photos have after trying it for a few days. I also made the jump and the device's photo library has become a mere backup of my photos. Going further, I agree with the author that if quick (or even auto) tagging of photo was easier it would help a lot. Btw, I don't know how much Lightroom improved on iOS, but it always felt like a hassle to get photos into it. The same could be said for desktop version. I'd select a few important shots and do whatever it takes to have them in Lightroom, but there's no way I'd use that as my primary photo manager, and I feel that those "serious" people also have a different managing system that doesn't rely on Lightroom (I remember articles about pros manually filtering in folders and backups before even starting lightroom)
- coldtea 10y ago
  >The point was not that events shouldn't be organized, more that they are occasional and other camera use are as important. Which is wrong. Far more people take vacations photos, selfies, events (birthdays, out with friends), kids, pets and food shots, than shoot their receipts or use their camera as a magnifying glass (taking a picture and zooming in to read something). And yet, he puts those outlier usages at 99% of camera use, saying that the regular selfie/vacation/kids/etc photos are "1% of photography. On which I call BS.
  - sdenton4 10y ago
    How often do you get a receipt, and hope often do you go on trips? Really it seems like the camera app should feed out new photos to other apps, like the receipt organizing app, to decide whether it's a relevant image or not, and act accordingly. Put the smarts in there downstream apps, not there cameras app...

iiiggglll 10y ago

I think that both major mobile platforms need to revamp their photo flows to adapt to all the buckets mentioned in this article, along with a "private" bucket for things like naked photos and other pictures not everyone would want automatically "shared" onto a feed (Apple has dipped a toe in this water with the "hidden" flag on photos, but there is still a long way to go). And while I'm wishing, I would hope that they do all this while still allowing for automatic cloud storage and backup without compromising privacy. It seems one of the main reasons Snapchat is so successful is that it provides a flow for photos and other communication that isn't the traditional "single stream that also doubles a permanent and mostly public record" style of organization. It seems inevitable that iOS & Android will both have to eventually adjust their built-in camera & photo handling apps to acknowledge the realties of how people actually use their devices in this regard.

cjbprime 10y ago

There's some hubris in declaring that one company's disinterest in your wacky unproven unimplemented camera app idea results in them not understanding photography.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

> A year from now nobody will care about what I did at 9:06 AM while waiting in line at the coffee bar. I care what I did a year ago. I'm unlikely to look back at it, realistically, but throwing away little bits of history about myself doesn't appeal to me.

misnome 10y ago
This, and an "Automatically delete photos after X time" is simply a massive recipe for disaster, even if you layer it behind several explicit tagging actions. Even assuming it is bug free, how long before the first massively popular "Apple deleted all my [super important event X] shots".

furyofantares 10y ago

> A year from now nobody will care about what I did at 9:06 AM while waiting in line at the coffee bar. In 15 years you might, though! When I read chat logs from 15 years ago, a lot is mundane, but a lot either serves as a wonderful memory trigger or is a completely alien artifact from a person I don't remember being, and I don't believe I could have guessed in advance which chats would end up in which category. I expect the same will be true of photography.

copperx 10y ago
That a great point which is missed by so many technologists. It's impossible to know if what you created today will be important later, be it a photo, a blog post, a voice recording, or an email. I've found invaluable emails in my Gmail inbox written a decade ago. Maybe that silly snapchat pic you took today with your cousin is the last picture you'll have of her. Who knows.
dzmien 10y ago
Agreed. I have tens of thousands of digital photos from the past 12 years of my life, all of which I uploaded to Google's online photo service. It has the cool ability to search for pictures based on content (e.g. sunsets, dogs, specific people, among many other things) and it is organized by date. I love looking back on my life in pictures. Even the most mundane photos can stir up delightful memories. With massive amounts of storage available on the cheap, I rarely delete photos.
coldtea 10y ago
Exactly. Nobody cares even now what you did at "9:06 AM while waiting in line at the coffee bar" -- regardless of whether such photos get Likes or not. But you, and others persons in the photos, might care.

542458 10y ago

I get what he's saying. My phone has a whole whack of note-pictures of addresses, price tags, and slides from other people's presentations. However, I'm not sure auto detecting them does any good. Context (context that my phone doesn't know) really matters. A photo of a street sign might be a reminder of where I parked, or it might be a more traditional memorabilia photo because the street had an amusing name. If the street sign picture is categorized and behaves in the same way as the rest of my photos it's easy for me to find and manage. If pictures of street signs all of a sudden gain a new set of rules different from the rest of my pictures they're suddenly harder to manage. Worse still is if a memorabilia-picture is miscategorized as a note-picture or vice versa. I feel that this would be very confusing for many people.

Someone 10y ago

"I showed my girlfriend some tiny text on the back of a credit card. Without hesitating she pulled out her camera, took a photo, and then zoomed in on the photo to read the text." Not the best example of not understanding it users. iOS 10 will have a magnifier that handles exactly this use case (http://9to5mac.com/2016/06/15/accessibility-ios-10-macos-appletv-watch/ http://9to5mac.com/2016/06/15/accessibility-ios-10-macos-app...)

barrkel 10y ago
A photo is still better because the object doesn't need to be kept still while the phone is pointed at it for the entire time the small details are being examined.
- Someone 10y ago
  "The magnifier UI gives you access to the camera flash, and the ability to lock focus and grab a freeze frame." And yes, the freeze frame is at full camera resolution, so that you can zoom in.
- coldtea 10y ago
  They already thought of that. You would be able to freeze the item.

ansgri 10y ago

Strange they haven't mentioned the abundance of 'mobile scanner' apps, of which my favourite (and slightly affiliated) app is Smart PDF/A Scanner [0], which can work with any aspect ratio and has auto-normalization that makes text readable and printable. It also can be configured to send PDF as e-mail only to avoid cluttering the photo stream. [0] http://smartengines.biz/products/smart-pdfa-scanner/ http://smartengines.biz/products/smart-pdfa-scanner/

rbosinger 10y ago

Those are all really good ideas.

mc32 10y ago

Too bad Flickr never came out with a camera app. Tied in to their original uploader that would have been a pretty nice combination.

ghaff 10y ago
I suspect a lot of it was the result of Flickr having always been more oriented toward users with actual cameras who would do processing on their photos prior to uploading them. Not sure the degree to which that use case mirrored the actual one but Flickr was probably never all that focused on having users upload directly from their cameras.
- niftich 10y ago
  This. Flickr was always closer to deviantART / 500px and going after the 'carefully composed photo for its own merits' market than the casual photo sharing space.
  - mc32 10y ago
    Yes, there were and are many groups like that with curated content. But the great majority are photo buckets with no curation. That said, it was always "social". People made do with the tools Flickr gave them. But the tools were left to wither and were never updated or given finesse knobs. Then, when "good" phone cameras became mainstream[1] Flickr didn't take that and run with it to accommodate its users who were now using their camera phones as either their main cameras or at least took a good chunk of their pictures. One reason Flickr continues is it has a core of dedicated users, some of whom have tried alternatives but who come back because the others have very few tools for photographers to use (by tools I mean ways to organize, comment, tag, favorite, curate, groups, galleries, pool, moderate, etc. [1] The NYT's Damon Winter's getting recognition on photos taken with an iPhone in 2010 should have been the aha moment, but it wasn't: See http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-tool-to-tell-a-war-story/ http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-t...
    - 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

BadassFractal 10y ago

Speaking of photography, I haven't seen much in terms of new services or opportunities for photographers made available through technology in the past few years. Where's all the innovation in this field? Is the medium dying out? Instagram gave photographers a hugely popular new avenue to show their work, although it does shrink your 50mb asset to a crappy thumbnail. It's hard to stand out, very similarly to the App Store. 500px is pretty neat, but it's mostly an echo chamber for photographers, the public is elsewhere. Cameras are mostly the same over the years, just better and faster. Mirrorless is cool, but not necessarily game changing. Seems like a very static industry. We've all done the same HDR shots thousands of times from every conceivable angle of every conceivable object and person, it's getting stale. I suspect that most photographers will have to move into video sooner or later, as that is a lot more engaging for the masses, and still photos will be like black and white photography, mostly relegated to high art and academia. One avenue I can see happening down the line is that all of our assets and editing will eventually be in the cloud, a la Google Docs. Right now the only issue is the size and quantity of assets, which is orders of magnitude higher than text files, but we'll get there.

ghaff 10y ago
>I suspect that most photographers will have to move into video sooner or later, as that is a lot more engaging for the masses, and still photos will be like black and white photography, mostly relegated to high art and academia. I suppose it depends on what you mean by "photographers will have to move." The tools for creating decent video today are so good and so relatively cheap. But creating video that is in any real sense professional (including the professional of 20 years ago) takes an amount of time and effort that just isn't justified in most circumstances. By contrast, very high-quality stills are ubiquitous. Sure, the sweet spots could shift and handheld video with ambient lighting will beat quality stills for most uses but that hasn't happened yet.

therealmarv 10y ago

Hopefully somebody from Google Photos team will read that (because I don't have an iPhone)

misnome 10y ago

As an aside I'd be interested in hearing why the article title was changed here - I thought it was explicit policy to almost always have the actual article titles?

dang 10y ago
Please see the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. This one was both, so the guidelines mandated changing it. We changed it to a phrase from the article that seemed to more accurately and neutral describe its point.
- misnome 10y ago
  Interesting; although it appears as linkbait on initially reading the title, I'd argue that the articles central thrust is accurately represented by its original title - therefore counting as neither (using a definition of linkbait as a title to drive clicks that is not representative of the article). The article isn't arguing just that photography is changing, but that Apple is stuck in "The past".
  - dang 10y ago
    We don't always pick the best replacement titles; "Apple doesn’t understand photography" is such outrageous clickbait that perhaps we overcompensated. I don't think "Apple is stuck in the past" would be much better, but if you want to suggest an accurate, neutral title, we'd be happy to change it again.