We take photos to capture moments. A great photo can fill in the blanks of our memory, instantly recalling forgotten details and conversations otherwise lost to time. But has looking at a photo ever raised more questions than it provided answers? Let’s look at reimagining the Photos app to better tell the stories of your memories.
“Why was I wearing a winter coat in May?” “What were we listening to on that road trip?” “Why were you downtown so early on a Sunday morning?” Where our memory fails, technology can assist. Beyond being a great camera, modern iPhones store and can tap into rich libraries of data relevant to our lives. By interpreting this information through the intelligence of iOS, the Photos app could be expanded in two key ways to help weave our memories into vivid stories.
There’s a ton of great suggestions on the types of information that can be extrapolated from photos, and it’s certainly interesting to see how it would look in the UI.
I really like this concept, and it’s certainly something I think Apple could pull off. Even without collecting personal information en mass, as it can be done on the device. And anything that needs to be referenced from somewhere else can be requested completely anonymously, such as the weather or information about a location.