Saturday, March 31, 2012

Weird moments in tech - what's happening to home video and photography?

In the past few weeks I've been fighting a two front software war. On the one hand, iPhoto 8 and Aperture 3, on the other hand digitizing and managing our videos of our family.

It's been a tough slog. I expected trouble with the video editing, but I didn't realize how much trouble I'd have following Apple's advice to "prosumer" photographers. The migration from Aperture to iPhoto is fraught with bugs and bizarre pitfalls. (For example, a cryptic import option mysteriously determines the fate of iPhoto image titles.)

These problems aren't hard to find, nor are they hard to fix. In some cases simple documentation would do the trick. So why aren't these problems fixed? Why aren't Apple's Discussion forums full of complaints? (They don't seem to delete those as aggressively as they once did.)

I have begun to suspect things are quiet because all but a few hard core geeks have given up. Perhaps the software doesn't get fixed because hardly anyone uses it.

So if Aperture and iPhoto are so troublesome, what's happening to those millions of photographs and videos shared every day?

I suspect they simply vanish from memory. My generation had photo albums. Generations to come may have nothing ...

1 comment:

matt said...

Is it all future generations' photos, or just the prosumer-taken ones that won't get preserved? All mine just go right to Picasa from my phone (which is all I ever use to take pictures).