User Centered

One of the hallmarks of today's generation of mobile devices is a built in camera. I love the convenience of having it around, but why do we need it? Rather, what do we really do with it? I'm sure you bought it thinking that you now have the ability to:

• Snap pictures of your run in with Tom Hanks at that Los Angeles cafe
  
• Capture the "fender-bender" for the purposes of having them be admissible into a court of law
  
• Replace your Digital SLR for capturing the sun setting over the Pyramids of Giza (insert you correct spelling)
  
• Have an image to go along with every person in your address book.
  
• You see something funny/interesting/cool you want to blog/share/save
  

According to my rigorous scientific studies (ie- completely made-up) 98.56% of the usage of your camera is for the last bullet there. What's got me writing today is that even from that bogus number, a large percentage of those things I take a picture of are not anything i want to have around for any extended period of time. If it *is* something I want to keep around, I would have already emailed/sent it off to a place where I could more easily share/retrieve it.

So what are we left with? In my case a phone full of garbage that needs to be cleaned up in regular intervals. Why isn't there a "Send but don't save" option? Does your phone have this? Every phone I've seen lets you do the following:

• Save
  
• Delete
  
• Send
  

..mine also offers quick menu access to take another picture, or to set as callerID/Wallpaper.

I never see a "send and delete" or an automatic image cleanup, which is most often what I'd like to see happen. I'd like that UI above, but see a distinction between "save" and what I'll call a "work with" or "working image." (A better term would be appreciated...) This working image is something you are going to send, or crop or set or share with someone via MMS or email.. something that you don't want to "save" onto your phone in the traditional desktop sense. Speaking of the desktop, it's not immune to this either- working with screen captures and file manipulations and image downloads, you often end up with a littered file system that takes a strict "system" to keep the craft from the clutter. This system is most often just the user's behavior that compensates/adjusts for the lacking software. For example, in my case: "I store all my 'temp' files on the desktop- that forces me to deal with it eventually..."


Some picture I've already used, but is still on my phone.
BTW-Opera can we get a *real* image caption thing here?


In the case of the phone, I'd like the same "clean-up" rules applied to images as are applied to messages (MMS/Emails/etc..). All the handsets I've had offer a clean up after "X" days of messages. Applied to images, this would clean out all old *unsaved* images...of course, if you do happen to run into Tom Hanks and you want to show that around to everyone you meet, you'd just choose to save the image and it would be spared. Designed *this* way, the phone interface would be more in tune with my usage.

It seems silly to me to treat images differently than messages. Sure we tend to get much more of the text variety (so "X" wouldn't be the same for both), but the same circumstances apply. Some are important which we know to save or flag or move.. but images are all assumed to priceless artifacts just waiting to be submitted to the Louvre, when in reality it's a funny misspelled sign you saw on the way to work three weeks ago that you already blogged about.


edited- fixed my backwards logic