I want non-destructive editing for photos

August 10, 2009 · Posted in Technology · Comment 

I encountered two things recently that crystallized for me an issue I have been having with image files. The first was doing some reading on Final Cut Pro and finding out about non-destructive editing. The second was this Signal vs. Noise post by Jazon Z. titled Work in Photoshop, don’t Save in Photoshop. Jason talks about how when he works in Photoshop on user interface concepts, he no longer saves the results as PSD files (complete with layers), but instead he just takes a screenshot of the various iterations.

As I thought about those two bits of information, I began to realize that image management and editing is fundamentally lame because you have to save image files for every iteration of any photo you work with. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong. But there are times when I end up with a source photo, a photo with a conservative crop, one with a funky crop, the photo I upload to Flickr, the one that I size for placing on a web page, the one that I e-mail to people that’s print quality but under 3 mb (because that’s the attachment size limit at work), etc. etc.

What if there was some killer piece of image management software that helped you catalog and tag your photos AND kept a record of all the various pieces of specialized software that accessed the image, but didn’t keep any of the edits/filters/resizings you used. But then if you open the image in Photoshop (or GIMP or Aviary’s Phoenix, etc.), Photoshop itself has saved the various versions of the image that you told it to save and brings those up in a dialogue that you can scroll through and as you view each one, Photoshop is applying those parameters or filters, but the source image itself isn’t touched e.g. non-destructive editing. The same is true if you open it in Fireworks or Dreamweaver. The source file is the same but the filters native to that program and attached to that image come in to play when you’re actually working with it. And then, of course, the image that gets uploaded to the server is the correctly edited and sized jpeg or png or gif (or maybe even not then, but that’s getting in to some issues with cloud computing and future versions of html that are beyond my ken).

And did I mention that the source file will keep data on where it’s been uploaded via the image management software (whether that’s Picasa, iPhoto, F-spot, or Lightroom or Aperture, etc.) so you can see if you uploaded it to Facebook or Spreadshirt or icanhascheezburger or Google Presentation (and when)? Because that’d be cool. Frankly, image/photo management is a huge pain and the number of different versions of a photo or image one needs is verging on the ridiculous. Is this an unreasonable request? Is something like this already being worked on? Is anybody else as dissatisfied as I am with the state of photo management?

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