Carol Gering

I recently bought an external hard drive for archiving photos. It plugs into my computer via USB, requires no drivers, and requires no power source other than the computer. Nice. But, when I’m traveling–or even just out for the day–and think I may fill all the media cards I own, I still have to carry a laptop to download photos. My external hard drive doesn’t solve that problem. (You can see where I’m going with this. I need to buy yet another device to meet this need!)

Jobo just announced a new portable storage device called the GIGA one ultra. I was eyeing the older version (GIGA one) just the other day. The beauty of this drive is that it runs on batteries, and it accepts all standard media cards directly (no more need to carry a laptop on photography outings). The attraction of the soon-to-be-released ultra model is that the file transfer rate has doubled. Check this news release on Digital Photography Review for more details.

John Nack proposes an interesting idea for user-powered help inside Photoshop. His suggestion includes the capacity for storing notes, tagging them for handy access, making them available to other users, and sorting notes through user ratings of usefulness.

In an application that’s already so resource intensive, I have to wonder how large and bloated the software might become. I must admit, however, that I’m intrigued by the idea of software as a “living organism” that constantly improves “as users learn and share.”