Computers and the Internet

Computer software and the Internet have been just as influential in digital photography as have the cameras themselves. It is not really possible to use a digital camera without using a computer to store images and/or to download them to online storage spaces. Much has happened to enable this, from the software that comes with just about all cameras for uploading images to a computer hard drive to websites designed for storing and showing images.

The first version of the image-editing tool Photoshop was released by Adobe in 1990. This software, which has become the industry standard, was originally designed for manipulating images that were scanned into a computer. Photoshop really came into its own in version 3.0 with the introduction of its Layers function. Other image editors have come onto the market since then. Many of them are free, such as GIMP (originally designed to run on Linux systems but is now cross platform), or much lower in cost than Photoshop, such as Adobe’s own Photoshop Elements, which is a pared-down version of Photoshop aimed at the amateur photographer market. Most cameras come with their own cataloging and editing software that is suitable for basic changes, but most photographers need more, which is where third-party software comes into its own.

Many companies now offer online storage for images, usually in the form of a website that allows the images to be organized by the photographer and viewed by others. The most popular of these is Flickr, which first saw the light of day in 2004 and was acquired by Yahoo! a year later. The website was originally set up as a forum with picture-embedding capabilities for an online game. The game was shelved, but Flickr was developed as a photo-sharing site. Flickr currently has more than 6 billion images on its servers, and the average daily upload volume during 2011 was 1.54 million images, or 1,070 per second!