, cbae wrote

*snip*

On a computer, I don't even have to make that decision. I just double-click the file, and the OS figures out which program to run.

What does that have to do with how you find something or how people think about the contents? Like magicalclick said above you can tell people till you're blue in the face that photos are the same thing as files and they just won't get it.

*snip*

Look, you gave the example of creating an album called "Last Summer" on a photo site. If you do that, the album will be out of context next year.

Only in a world in which the photo site is as static as a named filesystem. Never seen a website which shows today's news? Never noticed the way YouTube surfaces the latest videos on the homepage? Why do you find it so hard to understand that things can be as dynamic as we need them to be? The computer can do the work of maintaining the context, why should I?

[/quote]

*snip*

Nobody creates a folder called "pictures of grandchildren" because those pictures would be more than more than just pictures of grandchildren. Pictures often contain more than one person.

[/quote]

And how exactly does that stops somebody from wanting to show someone else all the photos they have of their grandchildren? How does organizing them all by some other arbitrary single piece of metadata make it easier for someone to do this? How, in your hierarchy can I show someone all the pictures of the grandchildren without resorting to a search?

*snip*

How does the computer know that Jon is in particular photo? How does the computer know that the picture was taken on March 12th at Jon's birthday party rather than a picture of Jon while he's mowing the lawn on that same day? How does the computer know that the picture depicts an event that actually took place on March 12th rather than a scanned image of a hardcopy photo that somebody else took of an event that actually happened on January 12th BUT you just happened to scan on March 12th?

Never heard of facial recognition before? Never seen tagged photos on Facebook? Heck, if I take photos with my WP7 phone it can suggest tags before I upload them. And I'm not sure I remember ever encountering a digital camera that didn't date/time stamp photos, if anything it's becoming more common to even geotag the things. The metadata that matters is already there.

And how many search programs have you ever seen that allows you to search on a particular date of ANY YEAR? It just doesn't exist.

I take it all back, I'm clearly an idiot. It's practically impossible to write a program which can search for information based on a date without knowing the year. Maybe in a few thousand years technology will advance to a point when such mystical capabilities are available to mankind.

*snip*

I have DirecTV, and recorded programs are organized in folders by series. Each recorded program is identified by episode name, if available, and date of recording.

And did you have to give them all names and organise them like that yourself? Because that's what Sky+ does too and I never had to.

*snip*

Nice straw man again. Having file names does not necessitate that you reference files only by name.

You still have to give everything a name though, you can't just say "it's ok, I don't want to name this". Sure you can give it a stupid name or just do what most people do with their photos and just use the arbitrary numbered name the camera gave it. And then you can manipulate it through better interfaces provided by photo management software that let you organize things and tag things and search without having to muck around naming things you don't care to name just because the computer needs it to have a name.