The Photo Manager’s 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’s not changing with AI in photo organizing.
This was a milestone year at The Photo Managers, as our amazing founder, Cathi Nelson, retired. We’ll see if her retirement sticks. No AI can touch the passion and heart that a leader like Cathi or a room of photo professionals have. Here’s Cathi and I, about to dig into a lobster roll. Yum!
AI in Photo Organizing
Our keynote speaker, Jake Athey, zeroed in on AI. That’s the obligatory keynote topic these days. Whether you think AI is the best thing since sliced bread or whether you are so tired of hearing about it, AI is unavoidable. We think it’s making memory keeping even more relevant today.
This industry expert underscored that AI will only work well if the underlying data is good.
Garbage in, garbage out, as we first heard back in the 1980’s.
AI in photo organizing tools that we already have is great at sorting, de-duplicating, re-dating, and grouping photos into albums. Some of those photo organizing terms are confusing, but they are easily explained.
With bad data, AI creates a beautifully organized pile of garbage…fast. In photos, this means photos without dates or with bad dates. With photos still stored on DVDs and flash drives hidden in drawers. With paper photos still sitting in boxes.
AI is just a faster way to make a mess.
What unsupervised AI can miss are the stories we tell, the reason we keep photos at all.
AI doesn’t instinctively know which embarrassing photos from your college days are best removed from the family archives. 😉
AI can’t sit at a table with a widow.
AI doesn’t know how much your childhood dog, Penny meant to you.
AI can identify people, but it can’t distinguish your special cousins weekends you enjoy with your favorite people versus the work event you took last month.
AI can find photos of your ex-husband, but it doesn’t know whether to edit him out completely or keep him in the photos that prove he ultimately cleaned up and was a good father to your children.
AI can’t decide what’s worth keeping and what’s clutter.
The first ten years of photo databases was all about tagging. We’re now leapfrogging into the era of AI, where we can quickly organize the files by date, landmarks, and concrete subjects like beach and dog. But AI still doesn’t know the emotions that you feel when you time travel back to a vacation, a graduation, or a wedding.
Most of all, AI hasn’t changed what photo managers do: helping you go from overwhelmed to overjoyed by bringing your photos back into your life.
Do You Want AI Scanning Your Google Photos?
In fact, I question whether the widespread use of public AI platforms is really what your photos need. Just yesterday Forbes reported that Google Photos is now scanning your personal photos for its Gemini AI. The struggle between convenience and privacy is always in play with technology, but this latest development is a hard no-go for our clients and me personally. This latest assault from Google on your privacy is, as pointed out in the article, “solving a problem that no one has.” C’mon, science, let’s use all that energy, cooling water, and computer power for curing cancer and world hunger.
My firm spends a lot of time helping people who love their photos to exit Google Photos and use other solutions that are not invading privacy. If that’s you, and it’s time to organize your photos in a way that is private and organized, please get in touch.
Leverage AI Without Sacrificing Privacy
Coincidentally, The Photo Managers asked me to make a video on how to leverage the AI capabilities that we have inside powerful photo management platforms like Apple Photos, Mylio, and others, that are not appropriating all of your data for their own uses. Give a listen to learn how you can use, or maybe already are using, AI inside your photo management tools to organize your photos and enjoy them in a whole new way. I hope this short video makes photo AI a lot more accessible to the casual user, and gives you even more reasons to dive into enjoying your photos again. Click on the image below to play the 13-minute video about AI in Photo Organizing.
