"Let Me Keep My Metadata!" (July 22, 2005)
"They Took My JPEGs! & won't give 'em back!" (July 16, 2005)
"They Took My Kodachrome!" (July 2, 2005)
"Don't take my Kodachrome away" - Paul Simon (1973)
"They took our jobs!" South Park (April 28, 2004)

• Be very conscious of the limitations and problems with what I have done so far for my family photo sharing site.
• Quickly dismiss most of the commercial approaches I have examined.
• Ponder all of the limitations in Flickr yet admire how much better Flickr seems than the alternatives.

1. Storing vast amounts of data. (My family photos site of 1800 photos is about 8GB, so anything with commercial scalability is many terabytes, if not more than a few petabytes of data.)
2. Privacy controls to restrict (or not restrict) access to images.
3. Accessibility to images ranging from thumbnails to original sizes.
4. Preservation of metadata on all accessible images.
5. Facilities for adding/editing of image metadata.
6. Flexibility in organizing and searching, including many views:
   • Date (ranges)
   • Subjects (including lists of specific people, etc.)
   • Locations
   • Photographer
   • Expressions allowing combinations of the above and other info.

1. Continue the status quo.
2. Attempt incremental changes.
3. Attempt radical changes.

"They Took My JPEGs! & won't give 'em back!" (July 16, 2005)
"They Took My Kodachrome!" (July 2, 2005)
"Don't take my Kodachrome away" - Paul Simon (1973)
"They took our jobs!" South Park (April 28, 2004)

• Year published (copyright date)
• Song titles
• Performers/composers
• (maybe) lyrics and other descriptive information

• Both depend on esoteric compression algorithms to reduce huge data files to relatively small files, without loss of quality in the perception of the non-expert.
• Both are immensely popular on the Internet, in portable devices, personal computers, et al.
• Correspondingly, both have inspired prodigious numbers of software projects, from the obscure individual programmers to the mega-multinational companies, e.g., Microsoft.

1. With MP3, the metadata (ID3 and its competitors) started out simplistically, almost too simplistically. ID3 and its competition have evolved slowly enough to become de facto standards. The initial ID3 totaled 128 bytes, allowing for
   • Track Name - e.g., the song title
   • Artist Name
   • Album Name
   • Year
   • Comment
   and one byte for genre: "blues", "classic rock", "country", etc.
   On the other hand, metadata for JPEG started more comprehensively and leapt forward without apparent consensus. Where a small set of analogs of the above would be a great starting point, there are a plethora of fields consuming as many bytes as needed. For example, in lieu of the "Track Name" there are fields for "Headline", "Location", multiple variants of "Title" and other fields that potentially name the image. There are just shy of a dozen ways to describe the "Creator". There are at least two fields for "Description". Get the "picture"? See JPEG captions and more, EXIF, and IPTC IIM for some of the background. If you do pursue these sources, pay attention to the complexity and redundancy.
2. As a consequence of (1), MP3 software tends to be relatively consistent in handling of metadata. Further, there are lots of utilities readily available for manipulating MP3 metadata. On the other hand, JPEG software often ignores the metadata entirely. The few programs that attempt to notice the metadata do so in different ways making the metadata unreliable at best and useless at worst.
3. Digital cameras typically include reasonable starting values for the metadata and store them in the photo file. Things start to fall apart when the file leaves the camera.

"They Took My Kodachrome!" (July 2, 2005)
"Don't take my Kodachrome away" - Paul Simon (1973)
"They took our jobs!" South Park (April 28, 2004)

Digital photos allow for better solutions to that scenario, but for now let's consider some familiar, not so good practices:

• Depending on prints as primary storage. Though prevalent, this is not good for traditional photography or digital photos.
  • With film-based photography, the negative or slide is a better version, probably stored in a better (no worse?) environment than print(s) and least likely to deteriorate. But these original media versions are most likely to be lost, if, for no other reason, because they are small.
  • However, century old black and white prints seem to have survived pretty well. (See http://technologists.com/images/sm1890.jpg, for example.)
  • Half-century old color prints are more likely to have degraded, but some are still pretty good. See http://technologists.com/images/sm1956.jpg for one example. There are lots of counter-examples of faded 20th century prints, but there are enough existing good quality mid-20th century prints to blame sunlight and other environmental conditions for the counter-examples.
  • Let's stipulate that commercially generated prints from digital sources will last at least as well as last century's commercial prints.
  • But what about the non-commercially generated prints from digital sources? Can anyone reliably predict whether/when they will degrade?
• The above discussion intentionally ignores the art of creating prints from negatives/slides/digital files. That art is a gift in the right hands but, in my opinion, a disastrous overindulgence of almost all software for manipulating digital images. Using an enlarger skillfully to enhance a traditional print or Photoshop to do analogous things with digital photographs can be wonderful. But 80% of those who would use Photoshop either ignore the potential, or worse, misuse the abundant facilities.
• Depending on the camera's memory or the computer hard disk for storage. These are probably the two most vulnerable places to save digital photos, but are likely the most prevalent. The plethora of problems, and opinions on solutions, might fill a tome. Also, safely preserving digital photo files on hard disk is a specific instance of the bigger issue of safely preserving files on hard disk, so I'll not say much more about this now.
• Having just disclaimed the hard disk preservation topic, consider the most likely preservative practice: copying files from disk to writable CDs or DVDs. Depending on where the optical disks reside (sitting in the sun? locked in a safe-deposit box?), this may be a very good scenario. However, we do not have enough experience with the longevity of CDs and DVDs to really know. Will a newly created DVD deteriorate or not in the next decades?
• There is a seemingly preferable but minimally realized scenario: uploading the JPEG (or another file format) to appropriate web sites and depending on those sites to "do the right things".

"Don't take my Kodachrome away" - Paul Simon (1973)
"They took our jobs!" South Park (April 28, 2004)

1. Instant gratification. With most digital cameras, you can immediately view the photo, maybe even immediately print the photo, depending on where you are. Even pervasive 1-hour processing of film-based photography can't match that.
2. Zero-cost/minimal-effort to delete unsuccessful efforts. You don't have to tell the 1-hour processing clerk which prints you want.
3. Integration with television sets and computers. Most digital cameras come with cables that allow you to view your photos on your TV. All digital cameras are designed for easy transfer of photos to your personal computer. More and more, this can be a cable-free proposition -- remove the flash memory card from the camera and insert it in the computer.

"Well, Jane, it just goes to show you. It's always something. If it's not one thing, it's another." - Roseanne Rosannadanna

1. Yesterday, I upgraded my VAIO to Windows Media Center 2005. So far, I haven't noticed much that is different. However, I was dismayed at the number of reboots it took to get the upgrade accomplished, the number of personalized settings that had to be reset, etc.
2. My Uncle Hugh, who will turn 90 later this year, has just started using email and web browsers, under his daughter's tutelage. So he is now the oldest recipient of this distribution.

"Come together right now over me" - John Lennon

"It was 20 years ago today
 Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play." - Lennon/McCartney

better attention to Fedora. I've figured out workarounds for all of the problems I'd been having with Fedora Core 3 and may even use it on my production Linux server soon.

• The biggest problem I see is that Windows XP clients running SP2 do not "play well" with NT4 domains, in my experience. I assume this is a problem for Samba, as well, but have not bothered to test. To the extent XP SP2 works poorly in NT4 and Samba domains, this is a showstopper for NT4 and Samba, in my opinion.
• Though NT4 servers may be adequately protected from external intrusion by independent firewalls, they are still vulnerable to intrusions from local machines (unless the NT4 servers have their own firewalls).
• The big security scourge has become PUS (potentially unwanted software, in Microsoft terminology), more commonly known as "spyware" or worse. This makes it increasingly hazardous to use Internet Explorer on an NT4 console.
• Though I use Samba casually, it doesn't (yet) seem ready for production use in a network dominated by Windows clients.

1. AT&T Bell Labs, the birthplace of the transistor and Unix. (Of course, Bell Labs is part of Lucent, not AT&T, these days.)
2. IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, the birthplace of RISC processors and my first employer after graduate school. (Like the Wright brothers, Thomas J. Watson, Sr. was from Dayton, OH.)
3. Xerox PARC, birthplace of Ethernet and graphical user interfaces.

"Computer-based photographs, from digital cameras and scanned conventional media, have become pervasive. Major companies, notably Google, have produced a variety of (free) software and services (e.g., Blogger.com, Hello, and Picasa) to facilitate Internet communication and sharing of photographs. Yet, these have seen miniscule use, in comparison to email, web browsing and other more established Internet capabilities. This research will identify barriers to broader acceptance and attempt to overcome these barriers."