I have noticed a growing trend of people being unable to manage the amount of data they are creating. Photos are the best example. For years we took pictures with film cameras and hid the undeveloped rolls or prints in shoe boxes all over our homes. Now we have digital cameras and we are taking more photos then ever. If you were to ask me to find my photos from the 4th of July in 2001 I would be able to pull them up in under 60 seconds. But I have noticed my friends and family have a much harder time with their picture management.
Why is file management so difficult? I believe the reason is twofold, people don't like to work, and computers (windows especially) make organizing photos complex and tedious. The first reason is really up to the user to fix. I find most people will take pictures with their digital cameras until they fill up and then download the 200+ photos not really remembering where or when they took most of them. The second reason can be fixed with the software. I don't spend much time on the PC anymore but picasa is a great (and free) app that can be used to keep your photos all in one place and organized. The mac has iPhoto and while I don't think its the greatest piece of software on earth it does make getting photos off your camera and organized pretty damn easy for anyone.
The key to photo/file management is IMO Metadata. Most software packages and OSes for that matter have been moving this way. Windows vista will have a built-in search engine that will be greatly aided by Metadata. Spotlight the built-in mac search engine is already a Metadata hungry monster. What is Metadata you ask? Well its data about data :-) creation dates, keywords, descriptions, authors etc etc. Now it seems instead of worrying about file structures to keep your data organized its more about tagging your files with keywords and descriptions then ether looking at a filtered view of your files or searching for what you want. I had a hard time with this for a while, I was old school and didn't want to change my ways. When i moved to the mac i decided that i would recognize everything anyway. For example i don't have a complex photo directory anymore. All my files are just dumped in one big directory. Keywords and creation dates are all that keep them separate. This has greatly increased my ability to see very specific files without browsing thumbnails. Now i can just tell (iphoto) i want all the pictures that where created in November with a keyword of bubba (my wifes cat) and bam all the pics of bubba we took in November will be all i see. Granted this does take some extra work to keyword all your photos, but it will be well worth it in the years to come.
-PB
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