
Photography is changing - bpierre
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2016/06/19/apple-doesnt-understand-photography/
======
misnome
"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.

~~~
hrktb
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
> _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
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
Photos is a downstream app. It is different from the camera app.

~~~
kybernetikos
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
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.

------
iiiggglll
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.

------
furyofantares
> 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
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.

------
542458
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.

------
cjbprime
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.

------
Someone
_" 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-
app...](http://9to5mac.com/2016/06/15/accessibility-ios-10-macos-appletv-
watch/))

~~~
barrkel
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
"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.

------
mc32
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
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
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
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-t...](http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-tool-
to-tell-a-war-story/)

~~~
ghaff
>some of whom have tried alternatives but who come back because the others
have very few tools for photographers to use

I guess the evidence suggests that "social site for prosumer photographers" is
probably rather a niche and therefore hard to make a great business out of it
--at least at scale. There are certainly flickr alternatives like SmugMug but
none are SV unicorn-like businesses.

You're right that flickr largely missed the boat to appeal to casual shooters
although I expect a focus on those would have tended to drive their core
audience away. I do post photos on Facebook but I use it in a complete
different way than flickr.

------
BadassFractal
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
>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.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
> 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
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".

------
ansgri
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/)

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

------
rbosinger
Those are all really good ideas.

------
misnome
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
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
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
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.

