28. October 2013 · Categories: Photos

Thom Hogan has a nice article on the future of cameras. I agree that having a workflow that allows for quick and seamless sharing is pretty essential. Here we have two use cases:

  • Just sharing photos in some sort of public folder

    This works well for a dedicated camera, if you can set it up before you start shooting. The setup would typically happen on the phone, as it has the better screen, in the form of a “share for the next x hours” option.

  • Share a photo but adding a few words for each photo

    A lot more difficult for a dedicated camera. The best you can hope for is having the captured images ready on your smartphone to send on, as the ability to enter text on the camera is rather weak, and even with a touch screen would be rather clumsy, given its typical weight and shape.

The technical challenge will be to provide a great integration with the smartphone or tablet. Essentially you will want to use a combination of Bluetooth Low Energy and WiFi Direct, which would allow the connection to be always on, and would allow the camera to send pictures to the smartphone app / photo stream without having to do anything on the phone beforehand. You want to have a workflow of take picture(s), pick phone up, send photo with the just taken pictures already waiting for you on the device. And this is only possible with appropriate hooks on the smartphone OS, allowing a camera to activate a data connection to an app, even when this app is not running.