After you take a picture (using special Autographic film) you open a little door in the camera back and you can write a note that would come out between frames. Kodak built the Autographic to enable users to write descriptions onto photographic film. He actually has two vintage 100-year-old Autographic cameras. It’s not just an interesting “cocktail conversation” idea for him. One more word about Mike Wash’s support of adding descriptive information to photos. In a short time it could become a standard feature. It is likely that once consumers know that it is possible and easy to do, and they see the value of added descriptions in helping organize and find their photos, the market will favor the camera manufacturers who make that feature available. So we have the technological capability to add a voice-to-text photometadata function to digital cameras, and we have a need to embed descriptions to our digital photos, but –- for practical and economic reasons –- it must be cost effective for manufactures to develop it. Wash said, “You’re aiming for tenths of pennies here and there because all of that equates into less margin or too high a price to dissuade a consumer from buying your product.” He mentioned a feature of the Kodak Advantix system that didn’t get developed because the budget to put it into a camera, at. And that would easily translate into a low-cost feature.” Wash stressed that the cost threshhold is crucial to public acceptance. Wash said, “Voice technology has improved a lot over the past few years. Both Mike Wash and photometadata evangelist David Riecks support the idea. With the photo displayed on your camera, you click a button or open an app, speak a few words about the photo into the device and the text of your words gets embedded into the photo file. The idea that makes the most “beyond easy” sense is also a bit daring: voice-to-text software.
However, people will not want to allocate any time to the task of adding metadata for example, typing a description into a camera or a smart phone would be awkward, time consuming and unappealing. Wash added, though, that “documenting information about the photo” is one of the features his team of engineers at Kodak had on their list of unmet consumer needs. Creating an ‘all things to all people’ type of one-touch metadata entry is going to be pretty hard.” But the hardest part is going to be dealing with the variable nature of what type of information you would use. Wash said, “I think that nearly everyone would agree that some sort of data associated with an image is valuable. I asked him if it was possible to have a feature on a digital camera that would enable users to easily add metadata. While at Kodak, Wash was responsible for many of the automated developments that we take granted on cameras today, like autofocus, automatic light adjustment and technical metadata recording (such as the date and time the photo was taken and the light and shutter-speed settings). Mike Wash, the CIO of NARA, was an Kodak engineer for about 30 years. (“Oh, that’s grandma when she was a teenager.”) Similarly, adding descriptions to digital photos - photometadata - is a good practice but it is also a chore. But someday these descriptions may help jog your memory or help other viewers understand the content of the photos. It’s time consuming, you have to wait for the ink to dry until you can stack the photos and so on. Doing so (writing on paper photos) is a good practice but most people don’t do it, including me. But I’m going to save that for the end of this story and use it for a new experiment that will tie in with this photo of children.Īsking people to add descriptions to their digital photos is like asking them to write descriptions on back of their paper photos.
Substitutes for picasa 3.9 software#
And, of course, you can display and add metadata to a digital photo on a computer with the right software and a little effort. Phone-based and standalone digital cameras can display some basic photometadata (though I don’t think it displays descriptions) but you can’t add text. So, in general, the test confirms that there are few constraints - technical or financial - to displaying photometadata. Most of the respondents used photometadata freeware to display the quote.Here are some results and conclusions from that test. I also asked readers to let me know if they could see the quote and, if so, to name the program they used to display the quote.
Substitutes for picasa 3.9 download#
As a test, I ended the article by asking readers to download a photo into which I embedded a quote from Benjamin Franklin. Last October I wrote about the importance – and the difficulty – of embedding descriptions into digital photos.