abe: family, projects, ideas

Along the lines of image management, we started thinking about the fact that our lives are largely captured in the digital domain today, and that our extended family and friends are also at this level. While we are aware of blogs, etc, we felt that a central gathering place for a family (or close social group) could be very powerful - more than a blog, more than a “family website”, this would be a secure digital domain for each family member to use.

Picture this:

Take this idea beyond image sharing, to documents, family history, videos, artwork, projects, and even simple journals. You get to pick who can see your stuff, and vice versa. This could be extended to Yahoo! / Dashboard / KDE widgets, so people could have little “house” graphics on their desktop for each group member, which would wave little flags or something, alerting users that someone in their social group has just shared something with everyone. Something like the town centers of cute little New England towns, a family compound that contains everything and anything a group might want… still fleshing this out… but definitely feel that the options available today are nowhere near the potential.

All (and there is a lot) of the image management programs and websites purport to allow users to organize their image collections. However, my wife and I have over 3,500 images which are not well organized, and we found all the options we tried to be cumbersome at best in bringing any type of order to this. So we brainstormed what we wanted, and came up with the following feature list:

• Non-proprietary database (i.e. we want our images portable anywhere! and certainly don’t want to be locked into any one site from a long-term perspective.)
• Easy to use / fast - able to crank through 3,500+ images without wasting time
• Ability to add metadata directly to the image format itself (EXIF/IPTC/etc.) rather than storing it in that proprietary database we mentioned not wanting earlier

So we are designing and implementing some quick software that will accomplish these goals. Initially this will be used to organize our collection of images, however if we find it quite useful, we may go further with the concept. More to come as progress is made.