Blurry Clouds and Sharp Photos

Gerard Murphy - June 01, 2012 | Backup, Cloud Computing, Digital Asset Management, Mosaic, Photographers, Social Media, Uncategorized, Workflow

This vision was reinforced at the recent Google Plus Photographers Conference when I listened to the Opening Keynote. Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Product Management at Google+, spoke about how important photography is to making G+ work.

He said, “Photos are the lifeblood of our service”. With the redesign of the G+ iPhone app, this is really evident. Photos are front and center.

Bradley spoke in broad strokes about some the lastest trends in photography, from lytro light field cameras to the growing importance of metadata.

Watch the whole video keynote here from Kelby Media Group.

About 35 minutes into the keynote, he began speaking about bringing all these trends together. This is where I moved even further to the edge of my seat. He did a great job of summarizing what we are up to here at Mosaic.

We are just beginning to unlock the power of digital photography. We waited as digital image capture slowly rivaled and then surpassed film. Brilliant software packages like Lightroom give us ways to examine our photography collections in ways unimaginable in the film age.

Adding the internet to digital photography has just begun. Flickr let us view pictures online more easily. But the workflow and archival process is still only available one machine. Flickr/500PX/SmugMug/Zenfolio are all awesome destinations for your final products. But they are not automated. The lines are not blurry – the lines between your device and the cloud are very rigid. They are static archiving. Not dynamic archiving like Mosaic.

We are going to continue to blur those lines until like good bokeh you have what you want in focus and rest is just a pleasing backdrop.

“There is huge opportunity for how the data is synthesized and stored. I think first of all we have to get more sophisticated in blurring the distinction between the device and the cloud. We shouldn’t even have to worry about that. Things like Eye-Fi nibble at this but ultimately every photo I take, every bit of data I generate, of course should be backed up, archived, made available to me, protected, made safe, as again there is no telling downstream the value of that data. I think we can much more sophisticated about how devices are smart about how the transmit the data, how selectively they transmit the data, transmitting the high priority data before the low priority data. Making it so I no longer have to think or worry about backup, security, storage all of that stuff should just be transparent to me, it should just be just a quality of the service that I use as opposed to something I have to configure and think about. I think we are getting there.” -Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Product Management at Google+.