Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [32]
For practically any photo, in fact, I always try to take at least two shots. If my subject isn’t a fast-moving object, and it’s still in front of the camera after the first shot, I usually get an extra for insurance. If I’m not sure which angle looks good, I take multiple shots from multiple angles. If the lighting is strange, I may take shots both with and without a flash. The “film” is free, so I use every opportunity to increase my chances that one shot will come out well. I just have to commit to filtering out all but the best shot later.
2. Filtering
With multiple photos of every subject, we now must separate the wheat from the chaff. As stated earlier, users can’t be expected to assign ratings, tags, or other metadata to their photos. Our system can scale to thousands of photos only if it’s free from such demands on the user. But users have to expend some energy to filter their photos; if they don’t, they’ll be left with mediocre shots, or multiple near-duplicates, resulting in overload.
What do users have to do, then, to filter their photos without using tags or metadata? It’s simple: let the bits go by deleting most of the photos they take. Consider that there are only two kinds of photos: the many to delete, and the very few to keep. Users need only make a single decision—yes or no—for each photo. (Think how much simpler that is than choosing from five possible star ratings, or worse, deciding what tag or caption to type into each photo.) The Delete button is elegant because it’s permanent. Metadata might need re-entering if the bits move to another storage system, but once a photo is deleted, it’s gone for good, and the user never has to worry about managing those bits ever again.
Filtering means deleting all the photos we don’t want to keep, and that also means letting go of good pictures that are near-duplicates of others we will keep. Some users have difficulty with this. If there are two shots of dear Aunt Marge in the same pose, it’s hard for some people to click the Delete button while Marge is smiling back at them on the computer screen. This gets easier with practice. Bit-literate users have to be quick, decisive, and ruthless with the Delete button (and not just with photos!). It doesn’t matter how many pictures we take; it only matters which we keep.
Once we’ve taken our pass through the photos with the Delete button, the only photos remaining are the best shots—one per pose, one per scenic vista—with no duplicates or near-duplicates in the set. These filtered photos are now ready for sharing (by showing to others in slideshow mode, uploading onto a website, or e-mailing to friends). Recipients may comment, as friends sometimes do with me, that the photos are unusually good. The lighting, focus, pose, and people’s expressions seem to come together for every single shot. But I’m not a great photographer; I’m just bit-literate. Because I maximize the bits by taking lots of photos, then filter ruthlessly, all I’m left with are unusually good pictures. The last step is to arrange the photos correctly.
3. Two-level storage
Even the most carefully filtered photos aren’t worth much if users can’t find them later. Without proper storage, they’ll either join the disorganized clutter of other past photos or get lost somewhere else on the computer. Users must have some discipline for organizing photos. On the other hand, the system must require as little as possible of the user, which rules out entering metadata like tags and ratings.
The bit-literate system for organizing photos is based on “two-level storage.” The key insight is that people can almost always find