The Future of Documents

My vacations are already far away, and even then I could not evade Digital Information Overload. Even in the most remote places like les Gorges du Verdon (”Verdon Grand Canyon”), digital cameras have become ubiquitous. Every other tourist and his grandmother has one, and snaps one picture after another – and I’m just like them.

What happens to all these pictures after the moment? Stored on personal hard drives, backed up on backup hard drives, NAS, or DVDs. Shared on Flickr, Picasa, or personal web sites, or by email, and backed up there too. Duplicated and enhanced sometimes. A downselection gets printed on paper.  That’s quite a huge footprint in the Digital Universe. Yet an overwhelming majority of these pictures will never be looked at ever again!

And technology is not making things easier. Higher resolutions, multimedia capabilities, high frame rates, and cheaper storage prices all aggravate that Information Overload. I ended up taking over 4.5 GB of pictures and quite a few videos with my two cameras. I remember the early days of Digital Photography, back in 1999, when I would have to capture my 3 weeks holiday memories on a couple 64MB CompactFlash…

This is Information Overload- having access to all that information and technology at the tip of our finger does not necessarily make our lives easier. But it’s not all bad, on the contrary. Sure, a bit of work is required to process all these pictures: filter, select, enhance and downselect the lucky few that I’ll get to publish or print – I don’t want to be another one of these photographers that just “dump” their 500+ photos, with 80% of them being almost exact copies of other pictures, blurred, poorly framed, etc… Fortunately some technologies, such as best shot selector, face detectors,  image classification, etc… are beginning to make that work easier. I might post on a few of these technologies in this blog.

In any event, a picture is still worth a thousand words … even if it’s a few million pixels.