Are we losing our photographic memory?
Are we losing our photographic memory?
The explosion of digital imaging technology, be it imbedded in a phone, PDA, camcorder, or a standalone digital camera, has left the world in no doubt that when it comes to capturing images, the digital revolution is very much upon us. But at what cost? David Braue investigates.
Click. Click. Click.
To photographers, this is the sound of progress and another potential captured masterpiece.
To IT administrators, it's the soundtrack to a worsening nightmare. Each time users of increasingly popular camera-equipped mobile phones push the shutter button, after all, the device captures several hundred more kilobytes of data that must be stored somewhere-and, increasingly, managed through its entire lifecycle.
By all accounts, the problem is getting worse quickly. Digital cameras have all but replaced conventional cameras, and digital camera-equipped phones are outselling standalone digital cameras. The world's largest maker of digital cameras is not Canon, Kodak or Nikon, but Nokia, which dominates a worldwide camera phone market that expanded to more than 50 million units last year, compared with sales of around 40 million digital cameras.
In Australia alone, around 3.5 million mobile phone cameras are expected to be sold this year and approximately 1.8 million digital cameras are expected to sell in 2005, with some executives claiming camera phones are outselling conventional digital cameras by a factor of 6:1.
Worse still, they're getting more powerful-which means they're generating bigger image files. Nokia's recently released 6670 smartphone, for example, includes a 1 megapixel digital camera that captures images that could-thanks to a growing ecosystem including wireless email and easily portable storage cards-end up just about anywhere.
The price of casual photography
While consumers may be happy to shuttle happy snaps into the digital void and dispose of them once they've had a chuckle, mobile employees using the phones for more serious purposes present an entirely new kind of issue. Widespread availability of photo manipulation tools and printing facilities let shutterbugs enjoy the flexibility of digital photography, but there are still very few ways for corporate archival systems-which are generally tuned for the handling of conventional paper documents and digital document files-to capture the fruits of more business-focused photo sessions.
This presents a problem for companies where images are corporate assets, just as other companies might rely on conventional Microsoft Word documents. Real estate inspections, engineering structural audits, insurance adjustor inspections, plant quality audits-the list of such potential applications goes on and on. And while workers may well insert their Secure Digital media card into the PC so images can be downloaded and catalogued on their hard drive, those mission-critical images are unlikely to end up in any sort of centralised knowledge base or digital archive where they can be purposefully catalogued.
One option, of course, is for employees to print the images and feed them into existing filing processes for handling paper. Statistics from the US Photo Marketing Association suggest Americans alone printed 4 billion digital images last year, up from 800 million in 2001.
Yet the likelihood of forcing employees to assess and print valuable pictures when theyre taken is remote, and the jury is still out on the quality and longevity of conventional digital prints. Relying on paper prints for archiving digital images is inherently contradictory, particularly since print quality is questionable at best and paper prints are difficult to manage, access and print.
Its also a strategy thats also unlikely to be successful in the long term. Relying on employees to print pictures opens up the possibility of creating an incomplete corporate record-or, even worse, facilitation violation of internal fraud controls by selectively ignoring or deleting images that might otherwise provide important information.
Permanence was never an issue when strips of negatives indelibly preserved the corporate photographic memory, but ephemeral digital media has changed this forever. As the world shifts away from the long-established world of negatives and analogue prints, it must find a way to make up for the loss of order. Otherwise, most companies will end up with a motley array of cryptically named images that have little relation to real business practices.
Bringing order to chaos
To keep the flood of images in check, corporate digital archivists may want to take a page from the experience of the digital prepress, advertising and production industries, where images are a way of life and focused solutions allow the storage of images that can be easily searched and repurposed for Web, print, DVD, online or other usage. This is critical since, with the steadily growing size of increasingly detailed digital images, it is impractical to generate and store many versions of images at different resolutions and sizes.
Dedicated image management systems, which include applications like Helios ImageServer and Canto's Cumulus, have taken much of the pain out of cataloguing and moving images; they can use conventional databases like Oracle, promising integration with existing corporate systems. Custom integration using Java, PERL and other languages can build automated workflows for the handling and archiving of images a variety of applications to do the imaging, searching, retrieving, archiving, and automated workflow.
More broadly, a variety of digital asset management (DAM) promises similar capabilities by enabling the compilation, tracking and repurposing of digital images.
"This is the centre of the workflow for companies in the niche production market," says John Dobbin, director of niche imaging integrator neXus network. "They have been at the heart of prepress systems, and were now starting to deploy them into corporate environments.
"Yet although companies are working to solve one requirement-that is, to be able to find an image out of a potential archive of tens of thousands-it just creates another problem in how they use that image. We believe best practice is going to come out of the solutions that are already used in the graphics niche."
Tools or no tools, control over image banks won't come automatically: companies need to establish a way for image files to find a way into the system. And when they're produced on a camera phone or PDA out in the field, there are no guarantees that will ever happen. "It becomes a file management problem," says Dobbin.
Image-reliant companies need to develop and enforce policies for image preservation. This should be backed by an automated way of extracting images from media cards, copying them into a central catalogue, directing users to add meaningful metadata, and storing them in a way so that users can search for them using keywords rather than having to pore through thousands of nondescript filenames like DCP_5124.JPG.
An effective solution may emerge as application developers build increasingly specialised applications for the smart phone market, which are becoming increasingly sophisticated through use of open operating systems such as Symbian. These applications will need to work in the background, automatically forwarding recorded camera phone images to a central server for cataloguing and archiving. To facilitate easy naming, the applications will prompt users for metadata thats transmitted with the image as embedded text, or perhaps as the body of the attached MMS (Multimedia Message Service) message.
The possibilities are significant. For now, however, mobile makers and network operators have yet to address the needs of the corporate market, preferring instead to let novelty value and a growing consumer user base keep the vendors focus squarely in that sector. Consumers are effectively the low-hanging fruit of the digital imaging market, since their imaging needs are often short-term and dont require the governance and controls of larger businesses. Theyre also unlikely to worry about issues such as the long-term inability to read image files as old image formats become obsolete.
There are, however, indications of order coming from the chaos: in late September, Fuji Photo Film Co., Eastman Kodak and Konica Minolta kicked off PASS (Picture Archiving and Sharing Standard), an effort to delineate clear requirements for long-term media accessibility. PASS will set explicit requirements for audio, video and image interoperability; define standards for media archiving, playback and printing; and unify existing standards for long-term accessibility.
In the meantime, images are continuing to pile up at an alarming rate. Get used to it: with cameras appearing everywhere and image permanence a thing of the past, it is critical to plan a strategy for preserving this important part of the corporate memory-before its wiped away forever.
Related Article: