In today’s LA Times, a representative from HP is quoted as saying:

"Digital photography used to be male-dominated; all images ended up in cameras and on hard drives and the guy would take care of it," said Larry Lesley, HP's SVP of digital photography and entertainment services. "Now it is shifting to the iMom who used to drop off film then do shopping. She's taking back control of the family memories."

The story talks about a new kiosk computer from HP that will go into drug stores around California soon to enable people to print their digital photos.

Now, it so happens I was in a Wolf Camera store this week, getting a battery for my bike computer. A woman in front of me was getting her passport photo, and I noticed the process. First the clerk took her picture with a digital camera. Then he took the media out of the camera and placed it in a kiosk in the store and printed the pictures. The kiosk had about 17 different slots for various digital media, and a CD burner too. It was a nice setup, and it took no time to get the photo printed and the woman on her way.

So these kiosks are already out there. It sure will help get those photos off the hard drives of the world and onto paper, where they then can be filed away in shoeboxes just like the analog prints of old.

Certainly, Apple has done more than anyone to make things easier: you just plug the camera in, and iPhoto takes care of the rest. And there are several solutions on the Windows side, including preclick.com (which is OEM’ed to HP, BTW). But it will be interesting to see if HP can recapture the balance of power over who owns the digital family photo assets. The problem, like so much of digital photography, isn’t about the tech. It is about family politics.

Now, I am just one silly user in this arena, but my digital assets are a mess. Part of the problem is that both my wife and I have changed so many computers over the past couple of years that we can’t keep track of things. Part is that we use both Windows and Mac PCs, and have photos on both (the Mac works much better but my wife is a Windows gal). And part is just inertia — this is a project for a rainy weekend, but we live in LA where we don’t usually have too many rainy weekends.

No amount of software is going to help us get organized. But I love the fact that guys at HP are targeting the iMoms of the world.