Rack ‘em and stack ‘em

Steven Drucker just blows my mind! His current work on organising digital media is just amazing.

Those of you who read this blog regularly know I have a love affair with my digital camera. My first flirt was with the Sony F-707. My tastes evolving, I now answer to the call of my beloved Canon EOS 300D.

On a good day I happily snap away 30 or more pictures, half of which I end up storing for later. Storage media being cheap these days the megabytes of image data stack up pretty quickly. The drawback is that you need a decent archiving system - if you intend to exploit all of this at a later stage. That’s where tools like Steven Drucker’s Media Browser come in real handy.

The basic idea behind most photo archiving tools is some form of indexation, usually though keywords, topics or dates. In my experience there are a number of hurdles to overcome when you intend to organise your growing library.

One of these hurdles has to do with keywords. When you initially set up your library you need to think very carefully about how you will organise it. You have to think ahead and imagine the various ways in which you will want to search, view and otherwise exploit your database. Changing the setup at a later stage can be very cumbersome. Fortunately, most tools come with pre-built categories which help you in this task.

Another hurdle to overcome with photo cataloguing software is the user interface itself. Some interfaces are just plain better than others. What you want is an intuitive interface with which you feel comfortable. The main point here is that the interface “does things for you” so to speak - it should be akin to your thinking process and follow you every step of the way.

Where does this leave us in regards to Mr. Drucker? He’s quite simply built the mother of all interfaces. The word “simple” being the key. To use his own words, what he set out to do was:

[...]create a single application that brings together a variety of recent UI advances into a single consistent, visually attractive, and easy to use application for applying labels to image and video files meaningful to the user.
[source: "MediaFrame - Reclaiming the Shoebox" by S.M. Drucker]

From the small preview I’ve seen of his work, he’s definitely succeeded. I’m looking forward to seeing the commercial application of this coming out once they’ve sorted out the scaleability issues