Photos Mess

Despite photography (electronic photography) continuing to be a category where most consumer product investments go, managing a photo library remains an unsolved problem. It works at a basic level thanks to mobile apps like Google Photos, but anything more advanced is full of process / conceptual gaps and a serious content management challenge.

This is the reason why the compact / prosumer camera segment died. People simply got lost in the complexity of managing the photo sets, including how they access the photos on the road (when they do not have access to a computer), where / how they do edits and how they backup and share the photos.

Things are super simple if you just have a phone. You take a photo, it gets geo-tagged and time-stamped automatically and gets uploaded to the cloud. Then you do some retouching edits and they are applied with an option to undo/redo on all "copies" (local / cloud) of the photo. Timestamping always uses a properly synchronized clock because that is what phone-based clocks do automatically.

Now add a dedicated camera to the setup and suddenly all starts falling apart:

• The time/date on the camera typically is out of sync. Either the clock has drifted or you forgot to adjust the time zone or daylight saving or both.
• There is no geo-tagging. Cameras typically do not have GPS receivers. Some manufacturers invent ways of applying geo tags via Bluetooth from phones (via dedicated apps) but that has never worked reliably for me.
• There is no backup. Lose your camera (or have a memory card failure) and you lose your photos. Phones back up to the cloud automatically. Cameras don't.  
• While some cameras offer some basic editing options, they are awkward to use, mostly due to the very small screens. Phone screens are at least twice bigger and tablets offer an order of magnitude more of screen real estate.
• Advanced users know how to copy photos from cameras to their connected mobile devices (phones / tablets). While that seems like a potential solution to some problems, it creates a bunch of new problems. To be able to fully edit a photo, a regular computer is needed. As of now none of the mobile apps offer the feature set of the PC/Mac counterparts. Adobe Lightroom Mobile comes quite close but it lacks the geo-tagging map module. This omission breaks the whole workflow, as you need to re-edit the photos on a computer anyway. See more here.

As I wrote before, one of the key reasons for this [camera industry] failure is they did not join forces to establish an interoperable standard for enabling phone apps to discover, connect and communicate with digital cameras. If there was a Camera Control Bluetooth profile, it would definitely be supported by Apple, Google Photos, Adobe Lightroom and other apps. It would take care of synchronizing time with cameras of any brand and would take care of synchronizing metadata (geo-tagging) and even creating an on demand high-speed wireless connection to sync the photos as they are taken. Clearly a missed opportunity with the consequence being the whole digital photography sector being pushed into the corner of die-hard enthusiasts.