Photos and videos: better ways for pruning and discovering

Jon Garfunkel
October 2024

I’ve been thinking about how to make the online photo storage & sharing sites more efficient, and ultimately more useful. 

Consider first the environmental cost: A 3 minute video clip, taking up 400 megabytes of file space on the Internet cloud is using an estimated 2 KwH per year. An efficient 9W LED bulb, being on for 2 hours/day 365 days a year, will use 6.5 KwH. I know to turn my lights off in my home. I just don’t have much incentive to cull my photos.

I’m apparently using 33GB of space for photos and videos. That’s 25 lightbulbs for 2 hours daily. 

Obviously, for a minimal cost, there’s a huge convenience to cloud-based storage & sharing, which is why people use it so much.

Google Photos, which I use, and the others (Apple, Yahoo/Flickr, Facebook/Instagram) could make it easier. They do have tools to identify the large videos. They could also offer to downscale any photos that aren’t favorited, and aren’t in albums. I’d be fine keeping a lower-resolution of some photos instead of deleting them entirely.

Recently I was reviewing some videos I took of a school talent show... and just as I was about to delete it, I thought..  what if somebody else needs it? How could they discover that I had it?

So let’s talk about a larger opportunity here.

For school plays, recitals, talent shows, I often wonder why the organizer or some parent doesn’t volunteer to collect any recorded footage. Often multiple people are taking videos together, and couldn’t these be edited together afterwards? Music fans often do this for rock concerts, producing, at the end, what looks like a professional multi-camera video. Certainly it takes having the software and the skills to do. Emerging AI tools should be able to handle this. What if at some point in the future, we have the tools and the interest to do this? All we’ll need to do is find the footage from the right time and space.

If I’m law enforcement, the answer is simple: send a subpoena for all photos & video taken at a given time and place.

We just don’t have a way for ordinary citizens to make the same requests.

Consider these other use cases:

• A town / library / historical society is looking for pictures & video of a town 

• A journalist is looking for recordings of a newsworthy event.

• A historian looking to produce a documentary

• An ecologist looking for changes in vegetation over time

• You’re looking for pictures that somebody happened to take of where you were on your first date with your spouse

As an ordinary user, I’d like to be able to query the major photo/video providers for a given date and time (this doesn’t uniformly exist today). It can return what it is public; but, more importantly, it can pass queries to the owners of the media. The system could also capture the reason for your request -- and what you’d be willing to pay. 

(I’d be willing to pay something to someone who just happened to catch the moment I was first at Lincoln Center with my wife. Years ago I searched what was available on Flickr and other repositories. It wasn’t easy, and I never could find these. Years have passed, and perhaps some pictures are getting periodically deleted, or the accounts expired).

Of course, if I’m looking for pictures of me with my wife, other people could be as well -- looking for their spouse... perhaps with someone else. So there’s potential opportunities for abuse here: cyberstalking, etc. So, let’s add some protections. Most amateur users wouldn’t request this more than once a year, certainly not more than once a month. Most people making requests more regularly would have some professional, educational, or other nonprofit affiliation (theater companies, PTA’s, libraries, etc). Maybe there's a fee and limits.

I could spend more time trying to think of other pitfalls, and ways of addressing them; and I'll had some at bottom if any come to mind -  but I am not the Product Manager for Google / Apple / Yahoo / Facebook needing to figure this out. I'd like to think they are. Or, they can reach out to me.