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Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Camera Apps Should Distinguish the Chaff from the Wheat

I take a lot of “utility” photos on my phone. Screenshots, grocery lists, broken stuff I need to find a solution for at the hardware store, documents I might want to refer to the next day, pictures of serial numbers too small to read.

I don’t want these polluting my photo library. I want options to frictionlessly classify a photo as “junk” (disposable) at the time it is taken, and have it go directly to a special category within Google Photos (or, ideally, any other photo app supporting the standard tagging API for Android or iOS). Much like the way Social and Promotional categories work in Gmail.

I think there are a few, complementary ways this could be implemented:

1.      A different camera icon/widget on the home screen.

2.      2 different shutter buttons on the camera app itself.

3.      Classification buttons when viewing the image, via floating clickable labels.

All could be useful, to me, #2 seems by far the most valuable.

(Whether disposable photos are auto-deleted within a few days, or saved indefinitely, should be configurable. As, for that matter, should be whether it synchs to the cloud from the device’s camera roll.)

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