As we amass an incredible amount of photos, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage our collections. Imagine if descriptive metadata about each photo could be appended to the image on the fly—information about who is in each photo, what they're doing, and their environment could become incredibly useful in being able to search, filter, and cross-reference our photo collections. Of course, we don't yet have the technology that makes this a practical proposition, but the Descriptive Camera explores these possibilities.

I've been thinking about the value and importance of meta-data for a while, mainly in relation to my own storyline project and how much I'm reliant on the hand-written annotations (which I'm classing as meta-data) of my Mum to help me place the physical photographs and items she had kept (hoarded might actually be a better word) in time and space.

As this seems to be an itch for me at the moment, I'm planning to do a bit more thinking and researching about this as I continue to explore the ideas and values of meta-data - probably mostly from a personal perspective, but hopefully with a brief foray towards the value for social historians etc as well.