December 11, 2024

The 2024 Visual 1st Perspectives Roundup

Time to reflect and feel the need to catch up on your reading?

Here's some ammunition: 23 Visual 1st Perspectives issues, and 160 news items from our "And a few more things" photo & video industry news segments, sorted alphabetically by the main company featured in these items. (…)

November 20, 2024

Targeting your photo products for a typical US household: Parents with kids? Think again.

With a “bomb cyclone meets atmospheric river” brewing here in Northern California and my gutters now properly cleaned, I got some time to ponder the US Census Data that shows how the US household composition has changed in the last 60 years. (…)

November 6, 2024

AI for visual content: move over “generative” – it's all about augmenting.

No surprise: at our recent Visual 1st conference “AI,” particularly the “Generative” flavor, was a topic of much conversation in the various fireside chat and panel discussions (as well as being demoed in many of our 30 Show & Tell presentations).

But as our 1.5-day conference unfolded an interesting theme emerged: more and more speakers referred to the benefits of AI for our industry in terms of AI augmenting photo or video solutions rather than first and foremost generating visual content. (…)

October 22, 2024

Visual 1st 2024 Recap; Visual 1st Award winners; by the Numbers

Attendance:

Sell-out, 190 attendees
80% Director level or higher
45% C-level or C-level/founder, 9% (co-) founder, 11% (S)VP, 15% (Sr.) Director
(…)
Visual 1st Best of Show award: PicCollage (…)

October 1, 2024

Meta’s vanillafying generative AI push – but that’s just part of the GenAI picture

At last week’s Meta Connect 2024 event, GenAI product announcements were front and center, and these products’ impact can’t be underestimated. Before summarizing the announcements most significant for the photo industry, let’s quote Mr. Zuckerberg for a change: (…)

September 24, 2024

Douglas Edric Stanley to speak at Visual 1st

We're extremely pleased to announce Douglas Edric Stanley, professor of Algorithmic Design and Playable Media at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD–Genève), as our third Visual 1st fireside chat presenter. (…)

September 16, 2024

The iPhone 16 lineup: Hello cameraphones 2.0!

Unless you've lived under a rock last week, you’ve heard of Apple’s iPhone 16 lineup. While it’s quite typical of Apple to highlight new photo and video capabilities when introducing their new iPhone models, these capabilities were front and center at last week’s “Glowtime” event: the usual yet more powerful lenses, AI (eventually) of course (in Apple parlance this stands for Apple Intelligence), and again more versatile processors to make this all possible. (…)

September 4, 2024

Innovation in photo print products, technology, and manufacturing – Where is the money?

The photo print industry continues to thrive and transform itself to meet evolving customer demands, while leveraging advances in hardware, software, AI tech, and manufacturing. (…)

August 21, 2024

Scalable imagery for ecommerce. The new frontier for innovation.

It’s hardly news that photos and videos sell. Ecommerce relies on compelling visuals to inform and entice customers, so acquiring these visuals is a necessary cost of doing business.

But what if, with a little help from AI, still images and videos could be captured, procured or generated at unprecedented scale, and individualized with just a few clicks – all at a fraction of historical budgets? (…)

August 7, 2024

How to turn photos & videos into more than a collection of dead pixels?

With photo & video industry news from the Magnificent Seven, Kodak Alaris, Canva, Leonardo.Ai, Artifcts, Getty, and Colossyan

July 24, 2024

Sketch-to-Image: the next frontier of hybrid photo/GenAI images

GenAI images these days can be created through many different prompts, ranging from good-"old" text-to-image prompts, to photos-to-image, video-to-image, audio-to-image or even multimodal-to-image prompts. More recently, we're also seeing solutions coming to market that use sketches to generate images (at Visual 1st last year we saw early demos of PromeAI and Corbu).

The newest kid on the block is Samsung’s Sketch to Image feature (…)

July 10, 2024

Diversity in the photo & video industry. Gender matters.

With news from Insta360, Printess, Lightricks, Captions, AgfaPhoto Print, Meta, CIPA and Nodle.

June 26, 2024

Photo & Video industry news roundup.

With news from Neurapix, Alice Camera, Claid.AI, MediaViz AI, Fujifilm, Augie Studio, Databricks, Shutterstock, Skylum, Uniclip by Flam, and ImageQuix. (…)

June 12, 2024

WWDC. A big yawn but …

Remember the days when we were all glued to our screen to hear the latest unthought-of innovations heralded at WWDC?

Well, with Apple getting bigger and bigger, and coming slower and slower to market (hello Mixed Reality through Vision Pro!) or not reaching the market at all (bye-bye Project Titan, i.e. self-driving car!), the exciting days of WWDC are long gone. (…)

May 29, 2024

Tone-death #2: Move over Apple, it’s Adobe’s turn

Oh, these marketing folks! After Apple faced widespread anger among creative professionals for showing a commercial at WWDC that promoted the AI power of its newest iPads by depicting a hydraulic press bearing down on an array of artistic tools embraced by loyal Apple customers for their work or hobbies, it’s now Adobe’s turn. (…)

May 15, 2024

Google I/O and other photo & video industry news

Google I/O. AI lovefest. Yesterday, Google announced a barrage of AI initiatives relevant to photo or video use cases – too much to dive into now, but here are my top 7 announcements directly relevant to our industry: (…)

May 1, 2024

Visual 1st 2024 – announcing panel topics and confirmed presenters

Also news from Soona, Zerolens, EyeEm, Freepik, Boris Elgadsen, Mood Camera, Meta, Alphabet, and Snap

April 18, 2024

Takeaways from our Re-establishing Trust in Visuals: Untangling the potential solutions Spotlight

People’s trust in visuals (are they real, are they manipulated, are we being tricked?) is at an all-time low, and it’s only getting worse. How will this impact our photo & video industry, or society at large? How can our industry help to re-establish trust in visuals? And can/should governments have an impact on the issue? (…)

April 3, 2024

The 3 most important benefits of being current on the coming industry changes to fight deepfakes and re-establish trust in photos & videos

– whether you’re a camera vendor; photo or video app developer; photo sharing, marketplace or stock provider; photo print producer; or anything in between.

With deepfake imagery exploding – and we ain’t seen nothin’ yet – how will you benefit from understanding the ins and outs of solutions being developed for re-establishing trust in photos & videos? (…)

March 25, 2024

The top 100 GenAI consumer apps – where do GenAI photo & video apps fit in?

It seems like forever since Javier Ideami’s fireside chat session at our Visual 1st conference back in October 2022 wowed us all when showing these new tools to generate stunning AI imagery. But it hasn’t been forever – we’re still barely tipping our toes into what GenAI has in store for us. (…)

March 6, 2024

"Fostering Photo Print Partnerships" Spotlight takeaways

Many thanks to last week’s Visual 1st Spotlight speakers, who shared their perspectives on the do’s and don’ts of partnering in the photo print production value chain + to Gary Pageau for his expert panel moderation! Below are my takeaways.

Partnering makes sense if …

…You’ve determined that your company’s core competency/DNA/passion/USP is in other areas than the areas that could very well be catered to by partners. (…)

February 26, 2024

Photo & Video industry news with BRIA, Google Gemini, OpenAI, Stability AI, Profoto and more.

BRIA. Raising $s. Congratulations to BRIA AI, last year's Visual 1st Best Technology Award winner, which announced it has raised $24M in a Series A! BRIA licenses more than a billion images from 18 stock providers for its GenAI creation platform. (…)

February 13, 2024

Image source labeling: going beyond Certified Organic

Let’s assume you prefer eating healthy (OK, I realize we’re less than 48 hours after your Super Bowl snacks). Come to the rescue in most countries: you can check out the nutrition label or see if the food carries a Certified Organic label. If a vendor happens to sell their product without a nutrition label or has put a fake “organic” sticker on it when it isn’t in fact organic, a government agency could very well catch them and they could face serious repercussions. (…)

January 31, 2024

From photo apps to photo print products – when & how partnering makes sense.

At some point any photo or video product developer runs into the question whether their company can – or should – develop an entire offering themselves or whether it makes more sense to partner with a company that could deliver part of their solution at higher quality, faster turnaround, or lower costs.

For the photo print industry two factors make this question extra critical, as there are always in-house production capacity challenges lurking: (…)

January 17, 2024

Sounds familiar?

It's not the first time that the world of photography is in turmoil with new technologies forcing photographers to rethink how to move beyond being visual replicators of the physical world.

Today, generative AI forces us to do the same rethinking.

It’s my pleasure to kick off the new year by sharing the perspectives of our esteemed industry friend, Paul Melcher. (…)

January 3, 2024

Now all 2023 Visual Perspective pieces available in one fully searchable compendium

Support the ongoing publication of our free Visual 1st Perspectives newsletter!

December 19, 2023

The game-changing impact of AI on the photo industry

Last week, Lightricks CEO Zeev Farbman candidly shared how AI is impacting Lightricks’ photo editing app business. For one, AI tech makes some of the work that used to require specialized software and expertise trivial, according to Farbman in last week’s interview with Axios. (…)

December 6, 2023

Photo & video industry news

Featuring Getty Images, Runway, Amazon, Freepik, Stable Diffusion, FiLMiC, Bending Spoons, Projector, Sony, Vyrill (…)

November 21, 2023

Photo & video industry news

Featuring OpenAI, Insta360, MyHeritage, Instagram, Meta, Google Photos, CYME (…)

November 9, 2023

5 takeaways from our Visual 1st fireside chat with Google Photos’ John Fisher

1. Meeting the challenges of a single photo solution used by 1/5 of the world’s population requires consistent adhesion to a clearly defined mission, coupled with intensive user research.

Despite the enormous demographic, cultural, and economic diversity of Google Photos’ users, Google Photos has managed to thrive through a single offering: There are no East Asian or West European versions, nor are there specific versions for the elderly, teens, young parents, etc.

October 30, 2023

This year's Visual 1st Award winners

Overall impression of this year’s Show & Tell presentations

In the past we saw companies who had incorporated Machine Learning or Deep Learning and people said: “Wow, you can automatically remove backgrounds or modify images!” and so forth.

Then the next year it felt like everyone had copied similar approaches and the excitement of AI had faded.

This year really felt like a big step forward again, but on a much broader set of use cases. Generative AI is already having a major impact in many areas, and we saw some great examples of that this week. (…)

October 17, 2023

Seven reasons you can't miss Visual 1st, just 7 days from now

1. You’ll meet with senior-level decision makers at potential partner companies, who have the power to help grow your business: cutting edge photo & video app developers, AI technology innovators, software companies, cloud service providers, photo print industry leaders, trade press, and investors. (…)

October 9, 2023

The latest Photo & Video industry news, featuring Google, EPIK, Meta, Canva, Unitary, Mediaclip, Picsart.

Google Pixel 8 (Pro). Pushing that phone's camera again. Or really: the phone's photo & video creation features. Besides the increasingly expected types of improvements in front and rear cameras (more here), it’s really the Pixel 8's AI-based and microprocessor-hungry in-camera and “post” enhancement features that take image generation to the next level. (…)

October 4, 2023

It looks like a photo, but it’s not real. So, what do you call it? We want to know.

With supporting quotes from Adobe, Tamron, TIPA, Ideami, DMLA, CatchLight, Viesus and Zenfolio.

Artificial intelligence’s ability to produce images that don’t originate in the real world but are indistinguishable from photographs is upending traditional attitudes and perceptions. The broad availability of this technology is enabling explosive growth of these photorealistic - but not real - images (…)

September 27, 2023

Who'll be attending Visual 1st this year?

Join us Oct. 24-25 in San Francisco. With news from Getty Images, Photo Lab, Open AI, GotPhoto, Microsoft, YouTube, Perfect Corp., Neurapix (…)

September 13, 2023

The next frontier:
Developing AI to detect generative AI

While generative AI is getting smarter and better in creating images that are hard to distinguish from regular photos captured through cameras, there’s been a growing awareness that we in the photo & video industry can’t sit idle when these AI-generated images become deceptive and any image, whether camera-captured or AI-generated can no longer be trusted, as Paul Melcher succinctly described in our Visual 1st Perspectives issue last month. (…)

August 30, 2023

Photo & video industry news including Picsart, Google DeepMind, Snapchat, Ideogram, BeReal, EyeQ, Outsnapped

Picsart. Growing that picture pie – again. Remember the days we all said that the quality of smartphone photos wasn't that impressive and complained that a much smaller % of smartphone photos was being printed compared to camera photos?

But it turned out that smartphone cameras led to a dramatic increase of photos being taken, which more than compensated for the declining share that ended up in print. (…)

August 16, 2023

Protecting your Content in the Age of AI

A week ago, leading tech companies working on generative AI pledged to use their technical abilities to clearly mark content produced by their AI. While this move is a positive step, it only lightly touches on the broader problems of reliability and trust in the era of AI.

Generative AI poses a major threat to visual content. The issue isn’t simply that fake images could be mistaken for real ones. It’s actually more concerning that real images could lose their credibility. (…)

[Updated link to Google Photos' new Memories view feature]

August 2, 2023

Visual 1st & DMLA & Announce Strategic Partnership and Cross-conference Ticketing Specials

Visual 1st and the Digital Media Licensing Association announce a strategic partnership aimed at their respective conference attendees to learn and network at both conferences, which will be held back-to-back in San Francisco this year.

IDMLC (International Digital Media Licensing Conference) will be held Oct. 23-24 (opening reception Oct. 22); Visual 1st will be held Oct. 24 (pm + reception) and Oct. 25 (am + pm). (…)

July 12, 2023

AI Image Curation 2.0 – when AI-based auto-tagging is so yesterday

Yes, AI lets you auto-tag and find the beloved cat, partner or food item featured in all your images, but we’re rapidly moving beyond these early machine learning implementations.

How about AI-powered apps that automatically find the best photos in the clutter of your camera roll? Or do the same for video scenes? Or (…)

June 21, 2023

My grab from the latest photo & video industry news

With news from Synthesia, PiktID, Google Photos, Meta, Google Shopping, Mylio, vAIsual, Printbox, Vimeo, Canva, and Stability AI (…)

June 8, 2023

WWDC: Apple’s second mover challenge

Remember we all thought Microsoft had the second mover advantage?

In the PC era Microsoft excelled in mimicking the features of innovative companies such as Apple and various others, learned from these innovators’ imperfections, and fed their me-now-too products to their gigantic consumer and corporate user base, while keeping their cash registers ringing.

It took a while but with the emergence of smartphones and cloud computing, and the WinPC platform having become less of a bottomless cash cow, Microsoft reinvigorated under Satya Nadella’s leadership with a focus on staying at the forefront of technology innovation.

Most recently this meant: generative AI.

And then there’s Apple. (…)

May 24, 2023

Our Visual 1st Spotlight takeaways:
The latest AI tech announcements – what do they mean for the photo & video industry?

Generative AI supports numerous use cases throughout the photo & video workflow, while creating both opportunities and disruptions along the way: from the obvious one – image creation – to image enhancement, editing, sharing, and fueling ecommerce and printing.

In other words: the significance of generative AI far exceeds that of “just” generating images from scratch. (…)

May 15, 2023

Imaging takeaways from Google I/O

To start: yes, most of Google I/O’s announcements are fueled by AI. (Not convinced? If you haven’t already watched it, check out this fun 14 sec. summary of Sundar Pichai's keynote).

And in case it escaped you: Google is very much in catchup mode, as the company that repositioned itself 7 years ago as AI-first had to see other players seize the limelight when announcing one innovative generative AI announcement after another this spring. Most notably coming from the Microsoft Bing – Open AI combo, which threatens Google’s core cash cow: advertising-supported Search. (…)

May 2, 2023

Speaker update for ”The Latest AI Tech Announcements” Visual 1st Spotlight

My partner Alexis Gerard and I are thrilled to announce that Boris Eldagsen, winner of the Sony World Photography Award in the Creative Open category will join our May 17 The Latest AI Tech Announcements: What do they mean for the photo & video industry? Spotlight in a special fireside chat session. (…)

With news from OnceUpon, Dscoop, Runway, Poparazzi, Instagram, Mediaclip, BeReal, Microsoft, Stability AI.

April 19, 2023

My grab from the latest photo & video industry news

With AI news from Sony World Photography Awards, TIPA, Kodak Alaris, Adobe, Picanova, Bria, ON1, Midjourney, EyeEm, Amazon, BeReal (…)

April 4, 2023

18 AI Tech Announcements that matter

With AI news from Goldman Sachs, Elon Musk, Adobe, Microsoft, Runway, OpenAI, Google, Midjourney, Picsart, Nvidia, and Stability AI (…)

March 22, 2023

Takeaways from our Photo Print App Innovation Spotlight

Last week, my partner Alexis Gerard and I had the pleasure of having 8 innovative photo print apps being demoed and discussed by their respective stakeholders in front of a virtual audience of 91 attendees. (…)

March 8, 2023

Pricing photo & video apps, cameras and print products

What if the race to the bottom becomes the race to the top?

Remember the days when we all complained that you that couldn’t make money from selling photo apps when most photo apps were either free or the average price of the paid apps was $2.71 for a perpetual license? (…)

February 27, 2023

This week's Photo & video industry news

Including news from US Copyright Office, Canon, Sony, University of Chicago, Apple, BeReal, Snap, Meta, and Microsoft.

February 15, 2023

Why this Photo Print App Innovation Spotlight?

With major transformations occurring throughout the photo print product value chain – in manufacturing, channels, and consumer behavior – it’s more important than ever to think outside the box as to how to best serve today’s – and tomorrow’s – photo print product buyers.

Rather than turning this rethinking into a conceptual exercise, our March 15 Spotlight will host up to 8 photo print app developers who’ll live-demo their innovative phone, web or PC apps, and discuss their apps’ merits vis-à-vis the photo print product value chain trends. (…)

February 1, 2023

Four takeaways from our Jan. 19 Visual 1st Generative AI Spotlight

1. Generative AI for visuals creation: we’re not even at 1.0 yet

New technologies and newly addressed use cases are still emerging; we haven’t even passed the peak of Gartner’s Hype Cycle yet (…)

January 17, 2023

Visualizing author Marcel Proust's words: Fine Art Photography vs. Generative AI

By Alexis Gerard, photographer and co-host Visual 1st

In July of 2022 my partner Annabelle Matter and I traveled to the French region of Normandy to shoot on location a project we’d been researching for months: Translating into photographs a dozen paragraphs from a text by French author Marcel Proust (of “Remembrance of Things Past” fame) renowned for his ability to convey vivid visual and emotional impressions to his readers through highly detailed and insightful descriptions. (…)

January 11, 2023

Today’s layoffs: Time to panic, or to just ask the tough questions?

It’s been layoff time in the tech industry – and that makes us all, including in the photo & video tech industry, a tad anxious when hearing of one layoff announcement after another. (…)

January 4, 2023

Artificial Intelligence et Photography

The contribution below is from our industry friend, Paul Melcher, visual tech expert, industry consultant and founder/editor of Kaptur Magazine.

Paul's thought-provoking answers were part of a recent article by Gilles Courtinat in A L'oeil, a leading French photography website. Below is the English version of Paul's answers (…)