Why is Digital Photography so Tedious?

Another summer vacation. Another set of photos. Another hours spent keeping them all organized. It is gradually getting better but still is tedious. The whole process reminds me a data warehouse. Aggregating data from variety of sources, cleansing, merging, until an acceptable result is achieved.

It all starts from the fact almost any digital device today can contribute to a photo collection. A camera will take pictures. And provide time-stamp information for each, which by the way is always inaccurate. Either because the camera clock has drifted or it reset itself completely as the camera has not been charged since the previous vacation, or simply the time zone has not been set correctly.

I used to have a habit of keeping the camera clocks on GMT, but this no longer helps merging together photos from several sets, as some photos (increasingly more) are taken with smartphones, and smartphones stamp them with local time, not Zulu.

Phone camera apps also try to geocode the photos and go way off track from time to time. Especially when a GPS service is not available, they try to use network information. So for example when you are on a plane approaching a destination in Florida, and that plane offers on-board WiFi service, your photos will be geotagged as taken in Washington (this is where the ground station for satellite - based in-flight WiFi is located).

So after a 6-day trip to Florida we've ended up with 5 photo sets. My Blackberry Priv and Sigma DP-1 Merrill and my son's Nexus 5 and  Nikon D5500. Added to that was a set taken by a tour operator on one of the days. 5 sets, complete metadata mess. To help with geotagging I was also using GPS logs from the Garmin watch. And it all took only about 4 hours and mastering several Adobe Lightroom and Garmin Basecamp skills to make it happen.

Ah, I've almost forgotten, all the final 75 photos, properly ordered and geotagged, I wanted to copy to the iPad Pro for viewing. So yet another Lightroom trick - exporting them all to an SD card to look like taken by a single camera and using the Apple lightning-to-SD adapter to import to the iPad's Photos application. Because there is no other way to have a full - res photos on an iPad for offline viewing!

Honestly, I've no idea how an average person copes with that. Either they give up and use only a phone do do all their snaps, or they end up with a fragmented "here are the vacation photos from my iPhone and there are the photos from my girlfriend's camera" library that I just don't want to accept...