10,000 Photos Volume 2

What's wrong with this disc?

Anything technical aside, the photos are average at best. They're not the kind of thing you'd find in a good quality publication. They'd do credit to a casual amateur photographer, but not a half-decent professional. Mostly they're obvious, conventional views of well-known landmarks, landscapes, animals and people. One or two pictures stand out as strong images, but otherwise they're nearly all "so-what?" shots. It's a car, it's a tree, it's a man, it's a field, it's the Taj Mahal again and again and again. So what?

Nothing is captioned. For many of the generic shots this isn't a problem, and most of us can identify the Statue of Liberty, the Taj Mahal and Big Ben. But for some of the other pictures it's annoying. They could be of some use or interest if you knew where they were, but you don't. All the pictures have filenames like P086A050.JPG and there's no other supporting information about them.

Things get worse when you look at the technical quality of the pictures. How do they get 10,000 photos into 553 MB of disc space? By making them low resolution and then JPEG-compressing them to death. Each picture is around 900 pixels on the longest side and takes up 40-60 KB of disc space. In practice, this means that they're not even acceptable screen resolution, let alone something you could print. They've probably used something like 50% compression on these images which is way, way too much, even for the web.

On that famous twin towers shot, the clear blue sky above Manhattan is streaked with obvious bands of differing shades of blue rather than a smooth gradient transition, and the buildings have that characteristic blurry ghostly shadow around their edges you get when you compress too much. They're not even remotely sharp. All the other pictures are similar.

Don't be fooled that you can export these images into a number of different file formats. You can, but it won't improve the quality. Saving a 60 KB JPEG as a TIFF isn't going to make it printable at anything more than credit card size, if that. Quality can't be added, only taken away, and most of these images' quality was taken away when they were compressed. Anyone could take pictures with better resolution and sharpness using even the cheapest and most basic of today's digital cameras.

This disc could be improved if you had a tenth of the images at ten times the quality. The vast majority of them aren't worth keeping anyway. But it's the prospect of such a huge selection that sells - it fooled me. I wish I'd done the maths first and worked out just how small and low quality the pictures would have to be.

What's good about this disc? There really are 10,000 photos here and there's a smiley face on the cover.

Back in 1995 this disc would have impressed anyone, almost just for being there. It's probably that old. Now, like the twin towers, it's history. It belongs in a museum, not on the virtual shelves of any self-respecting online shop. Nostalgic but useless.