Yikes! I have always believed that there is great value in EDITING -- the idea of less is more, subjectivity, and telling a story. More photos is merely more data. It takes the artinsanry of editing to turn a morass of data into "content". As such, one of the key deliverables by any artist, editor, or author is sythesising/reducing, in the most concise manner possible, that which is truly relevant. Young artists are advised: "show only your ten best pieces". Why on earth would searching the endless web for "more" not be less? In the end, this is why I enjoy looking at portfolios, why I love going to a museum, why I love reading a good book -- someone has taken the effort to separate the wheat from the chaff (even if I don't agree with them) Michael Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry -----Original Message----- From: karl shah-jenner <shahjen@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:04:33 To:List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students<photoforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: Re: News in the 1910's Don Roberts writes: : Peeter Vissak wrote: : > I wonder how many pixel photographs from the turn of this century : > will still be around in the 2050s-2060s : > to tell the story of mankind on this little planet. : > Peeter the Pessimist : I imagine : institutions like the Smithsonian and the LOC are very much aware of the : problems with digital images and have plans in place to archive those. I understand a lott of the archiving is being done on film, digital originals being retained - they're especially useful for rapid access, but long term storage on film seems the backup method : The biggest problem may be one of identification. You know when you do : an image search on Goggle you find many images that have been tagged : with your search terms but really are not what you requested. That sort : of thing may be a huge problem. I've noticed google's image search has been getting sillier and sillier of later, with wildly inappropriate material being thrown up (!) One way images can be searched effectively is if IPTC information or comments are written to the image* , then a file search can be done for say *.jpg (or RAW) containing text <word as appropriate, ie party, cake, dress etc> and date ranges are set in the search - say then I am searching for a customers wedding photo I can search photos taken in 2007 - search for wedding search again for (customers name) search again for cake within those results Another way is to regularly extract all such info to an excel spreadsheet and search that the same way. Another way again is using a tool like image seek which I wrote of here before, which comes in windows and mac flavours This lets you do a rough squiggle and then the program finds images which compare closely to the squiggle you drew, or if you have a photo that's similar to what you're chasing you set it off to find all such photos. it's free and it's here: http://www.imgseek.net/ and one day I hope goggle incorporates something similar :) Karl
