This blog post is as much a rant as it is a question.

 

The Guys Trip

Last summer, I had a few buddies come visit me in this wonderful place we call “beautiful Boulder, Colorado” (it always seems to have the word “beautiful” in front of it). These buddies were some of my best friends, now scattered all over the US. More and more, it’s becoming difficult to keep on top of everything in their lives and certainly even more difficult to all get together in one spot.

They came in town, partly, for Reggae on the Rocks, a reggae show (duh) at Red Rocks Amphitheater: an epic day at an epic place. We had a blast. And it wasn’t just a concert trip. It was a full weekend of festivities with great friends.

I’ll spare you the details of our weekend (mostly for my own reputation) and jump right to the end of the trip. My buddies are getting in a cab headed to the airport to venture back to their lives, kids, wives, and whatever else they do. As they’re driving away, my friend Jeff pokes his head out the window of the cab, not to say “can’t wait until next time”, or “had a blast”, or any other common departure phrase. Instead, he barked at me to “send me those photos, bro!” I heard the rest of the cab chime in with “yeah” or “me too” (creative).

See, we had all taken photos (and some videos) over the course of 3 great days. Between the 5 of us, we had taken over 200 photos. I prefer to use Instagram on the iPhone. My friends use whatever they use: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, or just the native camera for those photos we didn’t want on a social network.

 

It Just Didn’t Happen

How in the world were 5 guys with little time and little patience, each of whom have their preferred photo creation/storage/broadcast app, going to get all 200 photos from this one trip in to one place, memorialized forever? Well guess what…it didn’t happen. To this day, all those photos are scattered across 5 different phones and 5 different photo services. I guess one of us could have taken the initiative to setup a Dropbox folder or something, but for many reasons, that’s way less than ideal and more often than not, highly unlikely to happen given the amount of work involved: 5 people manually uploading all the photos, eating up each of our Dropbox space, no metadata, no tags, just a file named IMG_WHATEVER.

 

What to do, what to do

How do you do it? How do groups of people manage to get all their photos together into one spot? Like most of us, my media is fragmented all over the place these days. That’s a problem by itself. But when you add 5, 10, or more people in to that mix who each have their own scattered/fragmentation problem — well, it’s just a bit of a nightmare when we want to collect and collaborate around an experience, event, or even a topic.

So, yeah, this blog post is as much a rant as it is a question – how do you do it? What’s your solution? Comment here or email us at team@birdbox.com. We’d love to hear from you!

(And yeah, this is exactly the problem we’re solving here at Birdbox icon smile Send me those photos, bro! )

 

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