Forecasts

predictions of the cutting edge

 

 

 

Which way did they GO

Trudy Levy
Image Integration

One thing is clear. Digital imaging has arrived, though we still aren't sure where. Even grade school kids now include images in their reports. Family Christmas letters are littered with them. And need we comment on PowerPoint presentations? While the rest of the technology field is experiencing a negative growth, a recent IDC study (8/20/01) reports a projected 10 percent growth in digital cameras. They say it is because the market for digital cameras has moved into the mainstream. Those of us involved in the beginning had faith that this would be so. There were just too many benefits to be gained from digital imaging for it not to happen.

What none of us "knew" , and are still trying to ascertain, is: Which benefit would direct the market's adoption of the technology. There appeared to be three major directions:

Asset management was the initial leader. It proposed creating a library of current, accurate, visual and textural information which could be used in a multiple of formats. Of course in the beginning, advertising gurus, declared No. Individual photos are color corrected, sized and scanned to just fit that one advertisement, thus could not be used in other uses; so, get out of my sandbox. Also some users said "I don't have a special program to manage my other files why should I have one for my images?" Or " Why manage my images independently from the related content and media materials?"

Eventually, as multiple publishing options opened up - press to web, printed material to ebooks, marketing material to projected presentation, the reuse and re-purposing concept got modified to mean publishing the same information in different formats. Now delivery of a variety of file formats has become a vital component for any management application.

But the question of what exactly to manage and how, is still not resolved. Interestingly, I think an outside factor will direct this. This factor is the ease of publication electronically which is decentralizing the whole process. Either specialists create their component and then collaborate electronically or every Tom, Dick and Harry is creating their own material. Either way, images are being sought in a new way. Sought being the key word here, pun intended. Neither creators nor the curators are necessarily the users. How can the files be managed so that any Tom, Dick or Harry can find the image which they want. This conundrum is something that many a cataloger, and now the whole web, has pondered. Do you have time or money to develop the perfect catalog? What we need is a catalog that evolves with guidance as it grows and is used. Or perhaps a core catalog which each user can individualize just for themselves, by adding their own identifiers, such as my winter images. This would be the ultimate flexibility towards which the technological work process has been driving imagers.

Digital Imaging as a filmless technology is the current leader, especially in hardware. It provides an environmentally friendly, instant production of images which can be "corrected". As I mentioned in the beginning Digital Cameras is one of the few growth areas. What is not for nailed down, is how will people view digital images. Will they keep them on their computer or will they want hard copies. Next month we will prognosticate on this idea.

8/25/01
 
Image Integration
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