[rgbrgb]

Yeah, I completely agree that organizing consumer photo albums is not the biggest problem. However, what I'm trying to say is that (consciously or not) Photomatic found a viable (looking) way to work on basic research problems in computer vision. And as you mention, the technology could have much broader applications if it makes enough money and gets enough users so that is can be developed and scaled.

The drone company you're talking about faces at least 3 large problems that need solutions before they can make their first dollar of profit: 1) drone automation, 2) image processing, 3) customer education. That's going to take a lot of upfront investment. I'd go as far as to say that the photo organization app solves a proper subset of the drone farming app you describe.

All I'm saying is that I think you should hold judgement when a relatively boring application is solving some pretty hard problems under the hood. Often the application is boring because it's a low-risk vehicle to work on good problems. I'm of the opinion that a lot of really valuable technology (like valuable to humanity) is being developed under the guise of social networking and Apps. For me (for now at least), whether the apps are truly great art or revolutionary tools is a tertiary concern to making progress on and directing funding towards the more basic research problems that they're based on.