Peter Cochrane's Blog: My digital camera feature request

Written from Colyton, Devon via free domestic Wi-Fi

This summer I have been working and playing in the UK and the US. The locations have been both interesting and spectacular, and as a result I have taken rather more digital photographs than normal, in fact a lot more.

Looking through the (metaphoric) pile of downloaded pics this morning, I found myself struggling to remember where some of the scenic and people shots were actually taken. So in a couple of years I can guarantee I will definitely have no clue as to where I have taken the majority of my photograph collection!

Whist digital cameras just get better and better in terms of capacity, resolution and other features for the money, and have always annotated pics with time and date, they give no clue to location or occasion. And like everyone else, my collection is getting vast. The only clues available to me, apart from date and time, are the general context of the album concerned.

As an avid user of digital cameras, what I really need is a built-in GPS system complete with a microphone that would let me do real-time annotation. A date/time/location stamp augmented by a few voice notes would solve all my problems.

And guess what? It is now easy to do, so why not? I just hope someone is working on it fast because my pic backlog just went through the 8GB mark and the cataloguing challenge is growing fast. If I don't get it fixed soon my photos will become another sea of bits, and especially so for later generations.

What do you think of my idea? I'd like to hear about your feature requests for digital cameras too. Go ahead and post a reader comment below.