As is so often the case with technology, if you wait long enough, it will become unnecessary!

A team let by MIT researchers has discovered that software is able to identify many common subjects in images that have been compressed to a very small size.

Deriving such a short representation would be an important step toward making it possible to catalog the billions of images on the Internet automatically. At present, the only ways to search for images are based on text captions that people have entered by hand for each picture, and many images lack such information. Automatic identification would also provide a way to index pictures people download from digital cameras onto their computers, without having to go through and caption each one by hand. And ultimately it could lead to true machine vision, which could someday allow robots to make sense of the data coming from their cameras and figure out where they are.

Read a synopsis of the research: MIT helps develop new image-recognition software