The Power of Photos | Hacker News Reader

The Power of Photos

mittermayr.tumblr.com

68 pointsmittermayr24 comments

Roman here has stumbled upon a very powerful force in products. Emotions are the reason why we get up in the morning. It's what gives life color and variety and meaning. It's the reason why we have friends, why some of us might enjoy work, why we prefer to live "life" instead of lying in bed, waiting to die.

What Roman refers to in his photos is the fact that they are an incredibly efficient vehicle of emotions. In a small 480x320px package, you can reminisce about your unrequited crush, your first child just hours old, or your passed-away parents showing you how to use a computer. In that sudden surge, you take a sharp breath, close your eyes as your head begins to spin. You have just experienced a more-significant-than-average moment in life.

I would go as far as to say emotions is the primary metric of life. The "best" times of your life are when you are feeling a surge of emotions, indelibly marking it on your brain as a memorable time. The other times when you don't feel anything tend to fade away until its nothing but a bland grayness when you try to recall that period in time. To maximize life is to maximize the memories you can remember. You maximize the memories you can remember by experiencing more emotions.

Everyone wants to live meaningful, memorable lives. This is a primal need.

If emotions give life value, what if we can inject more into ourselves? Somehow we "cheat" the system and get more emotions than what is naturally due to us. This exists. We know this technique as "going to the movies." The reason why people pay $12 to watch a 2-hour long movie is because of the emotion stimulation that we yearn and crave for. It represents a very dense serving of love, humor, coolness, loneliness, accomplishment, disappointment, schadenfreude that leaves reality that much more bland and gray.

But wait, you might argue. I'm a diciplined software engineer. I'm objective, diligent, and focused. I don't have any time to waste with sissy emotions. I'd argue that if anything, as engineers, we're even more addicted to emotions than anyone else. We chase after the pure bliss that comes from building something ourselves with our own hands. That emotion is so powerful that it overtakes what normal people regard as "fun" -- movies, fiction books, computer games.

So, what does this mean for our startups? It means that for people who get it, it offers a powerful design mechanism that makes products that give primal value. If you have an effective mechanism to trigger emotions, you have built something of value that people desperately desire.

This applies to any sort of startup -- not just social network / photo apps. Add a narrative to the workflow; make your user feel things. Let them feel a heightened sense of accomplishment. Let them laugh because of an industry inside joke you included. Letting your users feel more things while they use your product is the surest way to beat your competition. More emotions mean more perceived value. More perceived value means more profit.

great point of view.

totally agree

jiggity, I think you articulated really well what makes Makers tick when you talk about the emotions that drive engineers (or Makers) to put insane efforts into building cool stuff. It's incredibly rewarding.

Not too sure about the bit that says our brain stores everything. There's a school of thought in psychology that works on hypothesis that our brain only stores partial information, and the rest is reconstructed. Bit like a fantasy, where you imagine the most likely outcome and context for the bit that you remember. I can't find it right now (how ironic), but the example was, that if everyone close to you (parents, brothers, sisters) insisted and told stories about you that did not actually take place, you would eventually accept them as reality, and be 100% convinced that this is what actually happened to you. Anyone fancies an experiment?... :)

i agree, this sounds much more reasonable ... and I think this explains why we quickly lose details of situations ... they are likely not deemed important enough (or possibly can be replaced with blurry bits and pieces and reconstructed). not a brain scientist. although this whole thing got me curious for sure.

> Today, we know that our brain is capable of storying an insane amount of data (estimates value it at around 2.5 petabytes, that’s 2.5 million gigabytes (more here).

It won't be long before this no longer seems like an insane amount of data. It's less than a thousand's of today's commodity hard drives.

i know, insane! looking forward to that :)

Can you imagine how Google Glasses will change this experience? You will be able to record everything you see, every day, every moment. Imagine wearing Google glasses all the time, for 15 years constantly recording everything. Then you will really be able to relive every moment of your life.

i wear glasses and for a while, i was considering trying this as an experiment (there were various options available with a camera in the frame and such) ... just to take snapshots every few minutes and do that for a week or so. thing is, this most likely will top the point of redundancy, where a sequence of images might just not be relevant anymore after the first image in a particular scene...

it is going to be a great tool for monitoring employees. muahaha

Great write up. My current startup is working on exactly this problem (pulling together all your photos from different devices and making it easy to find a specific moment). You might want to check it out, it should make the backup and explore process a little smoother; http://shoeboxapp.com

i like the idea of separating free from paid through original full resolution and really-good resolution. it's rare that I need full-scale photos, and even in those rare cases, I often get by with a lesser quality shot that I can still print at a reasonable quality.

the only thing I hope you guys will figure out is the sheer amount of data. photos means videos for me, I own a DSLR which records beautiful, and I mean BEAUTIFUL CINEMATIC FULL HD video ... This is the most touching and pure recorded material of things I've ever created. And they start at 300MB up to 2-3 GB sometimes. It might be a great song at a concert, it might be an interview I did or a whole lot of other things contained in 1-10 minutes of video. And while everyone surely sees this happening in the future, transferring these massive amounts of data to an online (my photos alone exceed over 300GB) is really hard to imagine, especially with the fear of losing it all through a crash. Which, I also have at home, in terms of risk. And selecting/picking certain photos to upload is going to ruin my master-scheme of things, it'll lead to new disaster for me.

So, if there will/is a way to upload EVERYTHING, which my bandwidth probably supports in a 1-2 months time-frame, and all my data is super-secure for LIFE (my life-time at least), then well, then I'd be happy to hand over all my most emotional material.

I'll check out the service when I get to it, it might be a great way to collect all my mobile snapshots from various sources and use it as a collector of being on the move.

You've got the idea. We're focusing on great clients to make the upload painless and keep everything up to date. Videos are next, but as you point out a lot harder.

1000memories also has a shoebox app. May cause some confusion.

I can't understand this sentimental attachment to the past.

go on ... explain, would love to hear

What is there to explain? Why the heck would anyone want to remember all the details of their lives? Worse, have them around for anyone to see (e.g. Facebook and friends).

I am unable to imagine some motivation for people wanting this.

hm, I would see how you personally don't feel like wanting this, but being unable to imagine why somebody would want it seems like a pretty sad thing to say.

photos capture moments. and since many photos are taken in the middle of happy, memorable moments, they represent an anchor to that moment back in the past.

life is rarely a ride of joy 24/7 365. and going back to these memories, I find, is a very interesting and often out-of-the-moment experience hard to find elsewhere.

Photos capture pixels. You get attached to it, like some people get attached to other inanimate objects (trinkets, lockets, and so on). It seems hard to believe people need these things to summon memories, but to each his own, I guess.

Every single human I have ever met has a profound reaction to seeing photos of both their past life and those of others. The further the distance in time and the closer the relationship, the deeper the reaction in general too. In addition, no one has perfect memory or a means to access all memories. This includes some rather well known savants!

Perhaps you are asking if there is retrieval value from photos? Yes, very much so due to the context, flow of information (in time, space and relationships) and emotional content.

From an external perspective (which is perhaps the lowest value), imagine if we had access to photo and possibly other media streams throughout the lifetime of key historical figures like Einstein or Newton or even your parents?

So, maybe the question should be, pbsd, are you even human? I am only half-joking...

It's not about remembering little details, but using those images as triggers to your own memories that you'd otherwise never recall.

(nobody said anything about showing photos to others, you're projecting your own privacy concerns on an unrelated matter)

The photo sharing was an addition to the point, and not really thinking of privacy. Who takes pictures, only to keep them to themselves? Seems even more nonsensical.

I guess it may be useful to aging people with poor memories?

Living in the present.

Time spent on dwelling over past happy moments is time wasted. The only reason I could imagine for looking into the "happy" PAST so is because I'm not happy NOW. But if I'm not happy now, dwelling over the past isn't going to fix it. Instead I should rather think about what's bothering me now and what it'll take to change the situation.

I've found out [through experience] that it's also useful to talk with strangers, people who aren't "tainted" by my view of the world and don't have an interest in whatever course of action you take. Independent perspective.

By "Living in the present" I don't mean to totally forget the past -- you need distilled past experiences for further success in life [learning,yay!]. But when past becomes a refuge in hard times for some person, it's as if that person gave up his/her life. They become "living dead" in a way.

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