There is a online game from the New York Times called Connections, The premise of the game is to form four groups of words that are connected from a a pool of sixteen words. Some connections are easy and some are difficult. I have a lot of experience creating groups from my years of sorting and organizing photographs. Now I’ve taken on the challenge of creating a portfolio of my photographs. If I can solve the Connections puzzles, I should be able to do this.

Place, Time, Subject

Digital photos are a bit easier to organize because a time stamp is embedded in the file structure. If the photo was taken with a mobile phone, the location information is also written into the file. The difficult part is deciding how to categorize a photo. Some of the AI tools can be of assistance, since they can “see” familiar things in the photos, such as facial identification and common themes like waterfalls and campfires. However the work of organizing photos into albums is still largely a labor intensive human activity.

Example

How would I classify a photo such as this? What album would be appropriate? I know the date (June 30, 2013) and the location (Coastal Maine Botanical Garden). Facial recognition doesn’t work when no face is available but I know that this is me. Does this belong in an album of garden scenes? How about one about rock sculptures. It is suggestive of a mood, maybe one of frustration as “head stuck in a rock”. This is the problem when choosing categories.

My Portfolio (a work in progress)

I’ve created a page on my website which will contain albums with major categories such as landscapes, animals, plants, architecture and of course the “Green Center”. Those pages will contain albums that are subcategories. For example the Animal Page might have an album for Cats, Dogs and Squirrels. I’ve used the WordPress plugin Photonic Gallery and Lightroom because it has the flexibility to display photos based upon how they were tagged, an easy task for a cat but a challenge when your head is in to see the page

John Poltrack Photography

Take a look, let me know what you think. This is only the framework, I intend to fill these pages over time, it is a big world out there.