I’m not sure why I even have to ask – but what is going on in the world we live in when I have to continue to manage pictures the same way we did almost 10 years ago? You take pictures with your camera – then you have to connect your camera to your computer – upload the pictures from the camera to the computer – which means you have to decide where you want to put the pictures. You can create a folder named by the event or date or whatever – copy all of your pictures to the folder – and then what? You have to install a program like picasa to manage them locally – then you have to manually upload pictures to the web… Why is this so painful? Every picture you take today is automatically tagged with the date taken, the time taken, and if you are using a cell phone like the HTC Evo with an 8meg camera
– then its also geotagged with the location. Since the average parent taking pictures of their kids can be very happy with the quality from their smart phone – this can be SUPER SIMPLE! Just have the images uploaded AS WE TAKE THEM to an online service like Picasa. But take it the next step – don’t ask me what “folder” I want to put the picture in. Use the information already in the photo – location, time, date to ‘tag’ the photo like we tag an email in gmail. Think how quickly you could search your pictures – no more trying to find an event from a few years ago searching through folders for a few hours – just put the location in the search box and BAM! There are your photos from that location. If I want to see all pictures from Christmas 2008 – I should be able to do that without having to manage folders and uploads and blah, blah, blah… I should just type Christmas 2008 and see them. Then if I want to see all Christmas photos I have regardless of year – just remove 2008 from the search windows and BAM! There they are! This isn’t rocket surgery Google – make my picasa offering cloud enabled! It just shouldn’t be this difficult!!! Am I right here or what?
6 replies on “No “cloud” solution for pictures yet??? Come on Google – make it happen!”
Have you seen the Eye-Fi cards? They have the ability to upload to Picasa, among other services.
Yes – but this won’t work for cell phones – and it only allows me to upload the image – it doesn’t tag and sort the pictures using the data already available – I should be able to search my photos for Christmas 2008 or San Diego or my daughter (using facial recognition) on any Christmas over the years, etc.
I can upload a picture from my phone to picasa or facebook or whatever – but it doesn’t move the photo to the cloud – so I’m left with having to manage the picture on my phone and now on the web…
You’re kinda asking for multiple things at once there, not a single solution…
* auto-uploading to the cloud (which Eye-Fi does for cameras, and applications could do for phones)
* facial recognition (which Google doesn’t offer at this time)
* auto-tagging and sorting (based on what “data already available”, besides geolocation and date?)
If you’re really that anxious to have photos auto-uploaded from phones, you could try taking a photo with your phone from within an Evernote application. :-P
@Todd – you are making my point – there isn’t a cloud solution for pictures yet – cloud isn’t a single solution – its a grouping of capabilities that allow a user experience that creates the illusion of a single solution. Do you think your gmail is a single tool? It is a contact management software, an indexing software, a email application, a web interface, a backend database, all with highly available geographically dispersed infrastructure – which you call “gmail”… :)
And I assume from your smiley that you understand Evernote isn’t a solution :D
Picasa does have some rough facial recognition running in the cloud, and you can send yourself pictures via the e-mail to picasa option or posterous.
@Michael – I’m not suggesting there isn’t a way to upload images from my phone to picasa – I’m suggesting that we don’t have a seemless cloud enabled solution for pictures. Its one of the big hang ups I have with ChromeOS (which btw I love running on my CR-48 free from Google!)… Without a real cloud solution – I can’t make the CR-48 my only computer – that and its terrible with hulu (very choppy) and won’t do Netflix due to no silverlight…