The Shared Image

What is the Shared Image?

Since the invention of photography, technological improvements have made it faster, easier and cheaper to take pictures. But the real value of images does not exist until they are shared.

Today’s digital technology makes it even easier to capture, edit and then share images; on the back of a handheld device, in a digital picture frame, a printed snapshot, a photo album or an online collection.

Here we look at some of the technologies that have changed our way of sharing and at some of the ways that we might share our images tomorrow.

The digital revolution in imaging has made it easier and cheaper to capture and share images. Taking picture has become all but free once you own a device, which lets you capture all sorts of fleeting images. What’s more, the rise of personal computers and the Internet has enabled new ways of sharing images with close friends or with the entire world. With more and more computing power packed into digital capture devices, users are freed of having to make complex settings before taking a picture.

Imaging Today

We have come to expect images to be nearly free, easily accessible and usable across a variety of devices. The substitution of an image sensor for film in many situations has been an important part of that shift. We have moved into a world of mostly filmless imaging and many of the basic developments that enabled this change were born inside Kodak’s labs.

A few key technologies in digital imaging are:

• Image sensor - working with the CCD, Kodak scientists and engineers built the first digital camera and then gave digital devices color vision.
• Image data formats - define how images will be captured, compressed and stored.
• Removable storage - is the modern-day equivalent of film, with the notable difference that it is reusable. The most common medium today is Flash memory.
• Computer Networks - (notable the TCP/IP standard) allows us to move data across time and space to friends, family, websites or print shops.
• Image displays - give us a variety of ways to look at our images, from the LCD on the back of a capture device to a full-sized computer monitor.

Imaging Tomorrow

We know that computing devices will continue to become cheaper and more powerful and digital imaging will follow the same trend. Digital technologies have made enormous strides in performance, meeting many of the expectations of professional and consumer photographers. Tomorrow’s technologies will move beyond filmless photography to intelligent systems that help us capture the images that we really want. Ideally, we would like an imaging system that has the performance and the flexibility of the human eye.

Another important area for future development is the ability to interpret image content and organize complex collections of images in ways that are intuitive and useful. As digital networks become ever more pervasive, we will access our images anywhere and anytime and our collections will be searchable much as electronic documents are today on the Internet.

Another important trend is the convergence of still and video imaging, which allows photographers to choose their medium at the flick of a button.

Each wave of technological change has brought with it new and often unexpected uses for our images. Tomorrow will be no exception.