4 ms·

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

by 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...
  - ryanmarsh 10y ago
    Photos is a downstream app. It is different from the camera app.
    - kybernetikos 10y ago
      I suspect he means that the logic should live in domain-specific apps which are subscribed to the device wide photostream. It sounds like a nice idea to me.
      - sdenton4 10y ago
        Exactly. Then you install the receipts app if you're there type of person who photographs lots of receipts, and no one else suffers bloat in their upstream photo app.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >How often do you get a receipt, and hope often do you go on trips? Might as well have asked "how often do I open a door, and how often do I go on trips". The fact that I get I receipt many times in a day does not imply that I (or the majority) go on and photograph it on my phone. Some do, of course (and I've done it a few times for very important receipts) but most don't (and not for most receipts). Whereas for trips it's rather the inverse. People usually photograph stuff on their trips. Besides trips is just one of the "regular" cases -- I've mentioned several. Do you really agree with the author of the article that: a) vacation photos, selfies, kids photos, food photos, casual snaps of friends, pets, etc. is 1% of how people uses their phone, whereas: b) receipt photos, and photos for magnifying things are the majority? I wouldn't even give 10% to the (b) case.
- hrktb 10y ago
  His most outlier use case (and mine I confess) is receipts, but kids, pets, food shots are not properly handled as well. For now it's selfies only, and in the next iteration face detection will be added. I think the best solution would be smart folders based on saved queries, instead of a trying to guess what 80% of the users should want to have and put baked in categories for them.
- shalmanese 10y ago
  Maybe in your particular use case. I know for me, my "incidental" camera use outweighs my "intentional" camera use at least 5:1. I take photos of the wifi password when I stay at a new place, I use my camera to get a shot of hard to reach places, I take photos of price labels at grocery stores so I can price compare to stores across the road etc. There's no external indication that these photos ever get taken since they're ephemeral and disposable but they form the photographic dark matter of my life.
misnome 10y ago
> 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) Lightroom isn't really aimed at day-to-day individual shots; For big collections eg. Studio shoots, photowalks, vacations, weddings you can very easily sort, tag, rate, tweak, exclude, work on multiple copies and organise into whatever folder/tag structure you want, without touching the original file at all - and you can tell it to just passively use your existing photo folder structure. AFAIK The iOS lightroom is only really useful for Lightroom-using pros who want to easily pull up their catalogs Most things I take on my phone just get auto-dumped into my Dropbox camera-uploads, where I can retrieve them if I want to. Most other usage of my 'Camera Roll' on the phone is flicking through the past couple of pages to show people what I have been up to recently. I'm not saying A simple, on-the-go tagging system wouldn't be useful, and there is certainly room for improvement, but I wouldn't by any means say that there is cause to say that they "Don't understand photography"
- hrktb 10y ago
  I mostly agree; to say two more words about Lightroom, I still use it with a set of catalogs spanning the entire library. But as you describe, the intake and structuring of the photos from the cameras and devices is handled by other programs and services (in my case Google Photos and dropbox with scripts dealing with folders and backup) and the sharing/publishing is also done outside of Lightroom. I think LR needs to know about all the photos to do the tagging and editing, but otherwise it becomes a smaller and smaller piece of the overall workflow. About the "Don't understand photography", IMO it's misdirected in the sense that Apple surely understands how people want to deal with their photos, but they seem to be pretty bad at this game, stagnated for a while (even now, they don't care enough to bring a competitive pricing model for the icloud storage), and now that decent competitors are rising up with features way ahead of what Apple has to offer they look like they're missing the boat. Fundamentally Apple has been going the right direction for a long time IMO. I think they're just wildly underestimating how much they are behind what people expect from them and are too slow on the execution to capture the needs of the moderate to heaviest users. As they are heavily flexing their marketing muscle tonpresent themselves as where photo happens on smartphones, there's a dissonance between their "with us you can take the best photos" message and the state of photo management on their platform.

by hrktb 10y ago

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...
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  Photos is a downstream app. It is different from the camera app.
  - kybernetikos 10y ago
    I suspect he means that the logic should live in domain-specific apps which are subscribed to the device wide photostream. It sounds like a nice idea to me.
    - sdenton4 10y ago
      Exactly. Then you install the receipts app if you're there type of person who photographs lots of receipts, and no one else suffers bloat in their upstream photo app.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >How often do you get a receipt, and hope often do you go on trips? Might as well have asked "how often do I open a door, and how often do I go on trips". The fact that I get I receipt many times in a day does not imply that I (or the majority) go on and photograph it on my phone. Some do, of course (and I've done it a few times for very important receipts) but most don't (and not for most receipts). Whereas for trips it's rather the inverse. People usually photograph stuff on their trips. Besides trips is just one of the "regular" cases -- I've mentioned several. Do you really agree with the author of the article that: a) vacation photos, selfies, kids photos, food photos, casual snaps of friends, pets, etc. is 1% of how people uses their phone, whereas: b) receipt photos, and photos for magnifying things are the majority? I wouldn't even give 10% to the (b) case.
hrktb 10y ago
His most outlier use case (and mine I confess) is receipts, but kids, pets, food shots are not properly handled as well. For now it's selfies only, and in the next iteration face detection will be added. I think the best solution would be smart folders based on saved queries, instead of a trying to guess what 80% of the users should want to have and put baked in categories for them.
shalmanese 10y ago
Maybe in your particular use case. I know for me, my "incidental" camera use outweighs my "intentional" camera use at least 5:1. I take photos of the wifi password when I stay at a new place, I use my camera to get a shot of hard to reach places, I take photos of price labels at grocery stores so I can price compare to stores across the road etc. There's no external indication that these photos ever get taken since they're ephemeral and disposable but they form the photographic dark matter of my life.

misnome 10y ago

> 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) Lightroom isn't really aimed at day-to-day individual shots; For big collections eg. Studio shoots, photowalks, vacations, weddings you can very easily sort, tag, rate, tweak, exclude, work on multiple copies and organise into whatever folder/tag structure you want, without touching the original file at all - and you can tell it to just passively use your existing photo folder structure. AFAIK The iOS lightroom is only really useful for Lightroom-using pros who want to easily pull up their catalogs Most things I take on my phone just get auto-dumped into my Dropbox camera-uploads, where I can retrieve them if I want to. Most other usage of my 'Camera Roll' on the phone is flicking through the past couple of pages to show people what I have been up to recently. I'm not saying A simple, on-the-go tagging system wouldn't be useful, and there is certainly room for improvement, but I wouldn't by any means say that there is cause to say that they "Don't understand photography"

hrktb 10y ago
I mostly agree; to say two more words about Lightroom, I still use it with a set of catalogs spanning the entire library. But as you describe, the intake and structuring of the photos from the cameras and devices is handled by other programs and services (in my case Google Photos and dropbox with scripts dealing with folders and backup) and the sharing/publishing is also done outside of Lightroom. I think LR needs to know about all the photos to do the tagging and editing, but otherwise it becomes a smaller and smaller piece of the overall workflow. About the "Don't understand photography", IMO it's misdirected in the sense that Apple surely understands how people want to deal with their photos, but they seem to be pretty bad at this game, stagnated for a while (even now, they don't care enough to bring a competitive pricing model for the icloud storage), and now that decent competitors are rising up with features way ahead of what Apple has to offer they look like they're missing the boat. Fundamentally Apple has been going the right direction for a long time IMO. I think they're just wildly underestimating how much they are behind what people expect from them and are too slow on the execution to capture the needs of the moderate to heaviest users. As they are heavily flexing their marketing muscle tonpresent themselves as where photo happens on smartphones, there's a dissonance between their "with us you can take the best photos" message and the state of photo management on their platform.