Philip Fibiger

A couple weeks ago, I went looking for a new photo for my desktop wallpaper at work to signify the change from winter to spring (at least the change elsewhere…in LA the change means a 4 degree increase in average temperature and a decrease of the chance of rain from unlikely to nil). Looking for a photo of Cornell’s campus in springtime, I did a Google Images search for “Cornell University” and restricted it to size: Large. I was scrolling through the pages of results, and on page 5 of the search, I saw a photo of the Olive Tjaden Hall that looked promising. I clicked through to the page, which was a gallery of someone’s trip photos. As I scrolled down the page of photos, I was struck by a flash of color that I recognized instantly. There was a photo of the women in our wedding party. On some random postdoc from Michigan’s website. It was pretty weird. Jeremy, Andy, and Dana also appear on the right edge of this other photo.

It seems like as the proliferation of digital cameras continues, and it becomes easier for people to host and share photos online, this will become more common. The likelihood that you’re already the subject of or in the background of someone elses digital photos online is pretty high, and getting higher. There was an example of this recently on Flickr, where someone uploaded a photo of a photographer shooting, and then the photographer found the photo and uploaded her original.

Of course, finding these photos is the difficult part, but it could get easier. Pro-level digital SLRs are already starting to come with built-in GPS, so that every time you shoot a photo it stamps the associated metadata with the exact location the photo was taken. If you also had say, a PDA that records GPS data, you’d have a historical record of everywhere you’d been and at what time. With a bit of data mining, you could share information with photographers who were shooting the same subjects you were, find photos you might have just walked into, find records of events where you didn’t bring a camera. It seems like it would open up a lot of cool opportunities for sharing and collaboration.