Hi Janne, Thanks, the thing with metadata is that it allows for great viewing and searching experiences. I had created lots of metadata and could find anything in seconds ;-) Now I have the file names sorted in yearly folders, so not too bad.

Yesterday the farse continued, I had Bootcamp installed on my mac, removed it by formatting the partition, then I tried to reclaim the space into a single big hardisk, now I have a ghost drive. I need to go to the Geniuses at the Regent Street Mac shop. In my despair I rushed to buy a new HD my first Terabyte disk. It took 20 years to go from 20MB to 1TB of personal computing space. A bit of a milestone.

It will be interesting to see how Nokia will solve this with Nokia Photos and the on-line assets. It is a hard problem to solve and there is a bigger social responsibility involved. Lets hope hardisks is not the papyrys of our civilisation.

--Christian, 31-Dec-2007


Yupyup, we have adequate common format support (JPEG and PNG is ready by everybody, and the spec is open and public and could be implemented from scratch even years from now), but all proprietary programs insist on building their own metadata structures. Which makes metadata essentially useless, IMO.

It's a tradeoff: whether you want a better experience now, or whether you want longevity of your data. I'm opting for longevity on the stuff that is important.

I really think that the only way to deal with this is automated metadata generation. For email, I don't bother with metadata - Apple Mail or any other mail program already has pretty good search functionality, and the email storage I use is commonly understood (replicated, of course). MP3's can be easily tagged with online, automatic services. Google Video even employs some speech-to-text services to index video - but there currently are no automatic ways to index images. GPS and other geotagging tools will help, but when will we see them for real?

--JanneJalkanen, 31-Dec-2007



More info...     Add comment   Back to entry
"Main_comments_301207_1" last changed on 31-Dec-2007 13:48:03 EET by JanneJalkanen.