Keeping track

It’s still the same task, digital or film.  And it is still not done well, sometimes at all, by most photographers.

The hardest part of photography, at the very beginning, was getting an image at all.  No one knew just what to expect of the chemical process, nor what was important and what to ignore.  After a great deal of experimentation success became more common as procedures were standardized (and chemicals were produced in reliable purity and concentration).  Then photographers faced the difficulty that remains with them almost two centuries later: how to keep track of their growing archives.

In a sense “keeping track” was the key to successful imaging in the first place.  Recording the relevant details of an exposure and its processing was the key to figuring out what worked and what didn’t.  But the task took on a different form when the number of successful images became greater than what one person could hold in memory, and some sort of index became necessary.  Where is the negative of that portrait of the MacPhersons?  Is it in the “portrait” file under “1869,” or alphabetical under “M”?  And that group shot of the lumbermen outside the sawmill: did we record all the personal names, file it under the town name, or is it kept chronologically?  Later, do we have a portrait of Emma MacPherson?  Have we any images to contribute to a photo-essay on “American Labor?”

If we have an image and can’t retrieve it, then we have really missed the whole point of photography, which is to capture some aspect of the past and preserve it.  (There are artists who create images for a limited time only, those who destroy a photo as soon as it has served its purpose.  But we contend that they have to be able to find their images for at least some period of time, and most photographers are not so destructive.)  Stuffing one’s negatives and prints into shoeboxes under the bed, a common practice, was a recipe for frustration.  But the boring administrative task of working out a system, and then carrying through with each new roll of film, took time and effort.

With digital imaging the process in practice became much harder.  The sheer number of pictures you could take threatened to overwhelm any system of organization.  Film negatives were fewer and self-organized by roll.  (Sheet film negatives are indeed one-by-one, but are far fewer yet.)  Digital pictures might stay in the camera, or be downloaded by the hundreds into a computer; even to decide which to delete and which to keep means a major investment of time.

There are tools that, in principle, make organizing them easier.  In computer, all files are in some folder, and it’s easy enough to set up a hierarchy.  And software makes collecting all the shots you have of Emma MacPherson a matter of a moment–if you’ve tagged them as such beforehand.  There’s the rub: you still have to enter tags manually.

AI might come to to the rescue in the future.  With a training set of images it should be possible for the computer to recognize all pictures of Emma, or lumberjacks, or sawmills, automatically.  But again we have to do the preparation: collecting the training set in the first place.  Maybe, maybe, someone will come up with a way to do this automatically, though it’s not immediately in prospect.

And there will still remain that ever-elusive file: “My Best Pictures.”  There seems no way to make that choice other than manually.