Los Altos, CA—What if consumers were no longer doomed to drown in their ever-growing pool of photos? What if they could easily find the photos they care about in a matter of seconds? What if their photo-organizing skills could be improved? These are the core questions addressed in the new Photos at Your Fingertips study conducted by mobile photo research firm Suite 48 Analytics.
The firm asked 1,009 North American smartphone and digital camera photographers to assess various photo-organizing methods, as well as the expected impact hypothetical “Photos at Your Fingertips” solutions would have on their photo organizing headaches.
The short answer: Consumers would do a lot more with their photos. Editing and sharing would see the largest increase, followed by taking photos and turning photos into prints. Almost half, 41%, of the respondents expect to edit more and 12% “way more” photos when such photo-organizing solutions become available.
The study also describes a range of approaches to solving the “drowning in photos” problem:
• Photo consolidation solutions, such as personal in-home device syncing solutions, family in-home device aggregation solutions, cloud device syncing, cloud device aggregation, and cloud services aggregation solutions
• Photo classifying solutions, such as image metadata solutions and image content analysis solutions (image recognition, face recognition)
• Auto-curation solutions, such as photo story apps
• Subjective context analysis solutions, such as behavior-based classification
Hans Hartman, principal author of the study, believes that the checkerboard of photo-organizing solutions currently on the market could be improved relatively easily through developers treating their solutions less as silos and instead connecting more with other photo-organizing solutions or non-photo data sources.
“If a solution can identify when and where the photo is taken, why not pull up third-party weather information so that the user could find photos taken on occasions when the weather was hot, freezing, cloudy or rainy? Or find photos taken during a specific sports game, concert or a certain Twitter hashtag explosion?” Hartman explained.
He also recommends that photo-organizing solutions providers think creatively about study findings that indicate consumers are not necessarily as technically advanced or inclined as developers might believe.
“For many respondents, organizing photos into folders on their computer is the ingrained method of choice. They might hate it or they might think they don’t have enough time to do it. But that’s where they are coming from. Developers should keep this in mind. They should be creative in building solutions that don’t assume everyone is familiar with tags, let alone auto-generated tags.”
The Photos at Your Fingertips report can be ordered at suite48a.com/fingertips.
Suite 48 Analytics
Suite 48 Analytics is a research and analysis firm for the mobile photography market. It conducts app market analysis and research among smartphone and tablet users. The company also organizes the annual Mobile Photo Connect conference. The executive conference focuses on promoting innovation and partnerships in the mobile photography ecosystem. suite48a.com