> The downside of that is that your ability to find a specific picture from 5 years ago is entirely restricted to the extent that you were able to organize and add specific metadata to that picture.
I disagree with the premise that we should spend time manually organizing and tagging our pictures all that much.
The metadata that the phone adds to pictures – time stamp and GPS coordinates – is already sufficient in a lot of cases for finding pictures that I look for.
And where that metadata is insufficient, improved search powered by machine learning will come to the rescue. And not just tomorrow but even today.
Just the other day, a few weeks back, I was standing in the kitchen that I share with two other people and I wondered to myself whether the kitchen knife in the dishwasher was mine (I’d bought a new one a few days prior but couldn’t remember what it looked like). I take a lot of picture of random stuff and mundane things, most of which I never bother to organize or tag or anything. I pull up my phone, search my photo library for “knife” and lo and behold, I did take a picture of it when I bought it and my phone has recognized the object in the photo to be a knife so it was able to find it for me.
Important files and photos I do organize. Specifically for three reasons:
1. Ease of access.
2. Grouping related data together.
3. Tying photos and other data to abstract concepts like ideas for possible games or products.
So I am not advocating no organization or tagging at all.
But I think a lot of people are unaware or at least haven’t really incorporated the distinction between information that is already present in the data, and information that must be manually added. So they spend a lot of time manually creating folder structures that encode information which could already be automatically derived from the data itself.
As for messages in closed apps, I just screenshot them. And I am relying on OCR technology to be or become good enough to refind those messages in the future. That way, if the platform itself is gone by then or the messages are not on the platform itself or hard to find on the platform itself for whatever reason.
So far I haven’t even needed to use OCR. Because if I look for a message I often have other memories of where I was, when it was or something else that happened around that time. So I just jump back in time in my photo stream and either find the screenshot right away or I find pictures near-by in time and spend a tiny amount of time looking forwards and/or backwards in time and I find the screenshot.
I do wish though, that iOS would automatically tag screenshots with the name of the app that the screenshot was taken in. And I think it would be cool if the screenshots were stored as SVG with pure text and vector shapes plus embedded bitmaps, so that the whole potentially needing robust OCR in the future thing could be side-stepped.