"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.
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)
> 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"
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.
>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.
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.
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...
>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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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".
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.