The Director of Photography industry conference in Boston this year was an emotional experience. After all, emotions are at the core of why we take, keep, and share photos. And that doesn’t change with AI in photo editing.
This has been a milestone year for The Photo Managers, as our amazing founder, Cathi Nelson, has retired. We will see if his retirement will continue. No AI can touch the passion and heart that a leader like Cathi or a room of graphic artists has. Cathi and I are about to dig into the lobster roll. Yum!
Our keynote speaker, Jake Athey, delved into AI. That is an important mandatory topic these days. Whether you think AI is the best thing since sliced bread or you’re tired of hearing about it, AI is inevitable. We think it makes memory storage even more relevant today.
This industry expert stressed that AI will work well only if the underlying data is good.
Garbage in, garbage out, as we first heard back in the 1980s.
The AI in the photo editing tools we already have is great at editing, removing duplicates, re-dating, and grouping photos into albums. Some of those photo editing terms are confusing, but they are easily explained.
With bad data, AI creates a pile of well-organized garbage…fast. For photos, this means photos with no dates or bad dates. With photos still stored on DVDs and flash drives hidden in drawers. And the paper pictures are still sitting in the boxes.
AI is simply a faster way to do damage.
What an unsupervised AI would miss are the stories we tell, the reason we keep photos at all.
AI doesn’t automatically know which embarrassing photos from your college days are best removed from family archives. 😉
I can’t sit at the table with a widow.
AI I don’t know how much your childhood dog, Penny meant to you.
AI can identify people, but it can’t distinguish your special cousins from the weekend you’re enjoying with your loved ones versus the work event you took last month.
AI can find pictures of your ex-husband, but it doesn’t know if you’ve edited him out completely or kept him in the pictures that prove he finally cleaned himself up and was a good father to your children.
AI can’t decide what’s worth keeping and what’s clutter.
The first decade of information graphics was all about tagging. We are now jumping into the age of AI, where we can quickly organize files by date, landmarks, and concrete subjects like the beach and the dog. But AI still doesn’t know the emotions you feel when you return to a vacation, graduation, or wedding.
Above all, AI hasn’t changed what photo managers do: to help you go from frustration to joy by bringing your photos back to life.
Want AI to Scan Your Google Photos?
In fact, I question whether the widespread use of social AI platforms is what your images need. Just yesterday Forbes reported that Google Photos is now scanning your personal photos with its Gemini AI. The struggle between convenience and privacy always plays out with technology, but this latest development is a difficult task for our customers and myself. This latest attack from Google on your privacy is, as the title says, “solving a problem you don’t have.” C’mon, science, let’s use all that energy, cooling water, and computing power to cure cancer and world hunger.
My company spends a lot of time helping people who like their photos get off Google Photos and use other solutions that don’t compromise privacy. If that’s you, and it’s time to organize your photos in a private and organized way, please get in touch.
Use AI Without Sacrificing Privacy
Fortunately, Photo Managers asked me to make a video on how to use the power of AI that we have within powerful photo management platforms such as Apple Photos, Mylio, and others, which do not capture all of your data for use. Listen in to learn how you can use, or maybe already use, AI within your photo management tools to edit your photos and enjoy them in a whole new way. I hope this short video makes AI photography more accessible to the average user, and gives you more reasons to get into enjoying your photography again. Click the image below to play a 13-minute video about AI in Image Editing.
