The Modern Family Photo Album
A picture's worth a thousand words, or so the saying goes. For decades we have been a culture obsessed with taking pictures. But for most of that time, those pictures ended up in a scrapbook or an old shoe box in some cabinet in the basement, never to see the light of day. These memories collect dust and don't function the way in which we originally intended them. But over the past ten years or so that is changing.
It all begins with the invention of the digital camera. While the first truly digital camera was sold in 1990, they didn't really catch on until 1999. I remember our first digital camera was an HP C30. It touted it's robust 1Megapixel shooting density. And while that first camera was a giant leap forward, to be completely honest, it was a piece of shit. It had a digital zoom, which just made the photos grainy and it took upwards of a minute to save the image file onto the CompactFlash card.
But as digital cameras got better and better, more and more people began to use them. Suddenly, people were no longer going to their local camera stores to get their film developed. Instead, we found it acceptable to show people our pictures on a screen the size of a post-it note. An entire phenomenon grew where people didn't have tangible copies of their pictures and were mad about it. The average consumer was probably adept enough to understand that they could move the pictures off of the camera and onto their computers, but who wants to sit around the computer monitor and look at photos from your latest trip. It just wasn't natural.
In 2006, Facebook brought us one step closer to a better way to look at our photos. The launch of Facebook Photos allowed users to not only post their photos to the internet, much the same way that Webshots of Flickr had allowed us in the past, but in addition we could attach meta data to each picture - specifically 'tagging' individuals. The idea of sharing photos by associating them with others' profiles has been immensely successful. Each month, over 6 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook and each day Facebook serves 3+ billion photos to users on the site. But again, the main means by which a person has to access these photos is through a computer.
Enter Apple. In 2010, Apple launched the iPad. Not exactly as 'revolutionary' a device as say their previous product launch, but the iPad dramatically changed the way we consume information on the web. The most important feature of the iPad is its large screen and extreme portability. Just as you could pass a photo album to someone else on a couch 20 years ago, today you can pass an iPad loaded with photos from your last trip. This combination of technology allows for a more intimate and most importantly natural conversation between the viewers.
Airplay is the next logical progression of the modern family photo album. Airplay takes the natural dynamic of the one-to-one sharing of an iPad and makes it one-to-all. As people gather in a living room (friends, family, etc), a single user can display what they're seeing on their device on a television screen. What's more, the television can now become an integral part of the conversation, since Airplay allows any user on the network to access the screen, sharing their own photos, videos, etc.
The advent of digital photography, mixed with growing technology in the household, has made our photo memories more readily available than ever before. It's not about having a tangible copy anymore. The important thing is in preserving the memories you captured and making them readily viewable at a moment's notice to anyone who wants to see them.
