August 1, 2002: I was talking today with Alex about the whole iTunes/iPhoto organization model and the rather obvious point came up that this kind of metadata-based interface to files is only as good as the metadata you have. The reason iTunes is (I think) way more successful than iPhoto is that a lot of the metadata can be automatically-generated via calls to the CD Database (e.g. song, album, artist, genre, year), and as Andrew pointed out, there's room for so much more. Not so with personal photos, which require the user to enter meaningful metadata for this type of interface to work (which is presumably why iPhoto surfaces tagging tools more prominently than does iTunes). As I pointed out to Alex, email is more like mp3s than photos.