The pros and cons of AI in photo organization
If you’ve read or watched any type of news media recently you’ve no doubt seen AI (Artificial Intelligence) referenced in multiple contexts. The popularity of online sites like ChatGPT is quickly changing the way we look at AI and how it is impacting our world. Some have compared it to when the internet became a thing, others are comparing it to the Industrial Revolution when machines started doing the work that humans were doing.
Will AI change the way that we accomplish tasks? Absolutely. Will it create different tasks that need to get accomplished because of it? No doubt.
In the photo world, AI is playing a more prominent role in helping us organize our photos. It can accomplish some amazing things and save us a ton of time, but the trust that we are putting into it also creates some challenges.
PROS…
Here are the things that I love about using AI to help organize photos:
1. Facial Recognition. AI-powered facial recognition technology can identify individuals in photos by analyzing facial features and patterns. This was probably one of the first photo AI features that attracted attention several years ago.
2. Deduplication/Image Analysis. AI algorithms can analyze the visual characteristics of images, such as color, composition, and quality. This analysis can be used to automatically group similar photos together and identify duplicates or near-duplicates. We need this in our life because I have yet to meet a client that doesn’t have duplicates in their collection.
While deduplication software has been around for a while, several apps are starting to pop up that take this a step further by helping us make choices when we have multiple photos of generally the same thing.
3. Content Recognition: AI tools can understand the context and content of images to provide some meaningful organization. For example, AI can help recognize a beach scene, sunset, or birthday party and create groupings automatically. This isn’t perfect yet, but it’s getting better all the time.
4. Smart Albums: AI can suggest or create smart albums based on similarities, such as grouping photos from a specific vacation, event, or time period. Apple Photos has incorporated several automatic smart albums into their app that group media types like Screenshots and Videos, which can be helpful organizational tools.
CONS…
While all of these features can be helpful, here are the things to watch out for when using AI with your photos…
1. Keeping your photos safe. This is non-negotiable for me with my clients. A system can have all of the wonderful AI tools in the world, but the most important thing it needs to do is preserve and keep your memories safe.
As a culture, we’ve become very trusting of systems and cloud services. I’m a big lover of cloud services for backup and accessing your photos, but some of the most popular online photo storage sites with the coolest AI don’t provide you with an easy way to back up your photos. Basically, this means that the cloud service has the only copy of your memories and 100% control over your family’s legacy. In this age where we no longer print photos, that doesn’t work for me.
I’ve worked with enough families to know that if it’s not easy, backup doesn’t happen. I’ve seen too many cloud storage services go out of business or change their policies to put all of my trust in one company, no matter how cool their AI is.
2. ‘Good’ photos are subjective. While I think AI can help us make decisions on which photos in a series are better by recognizing things like eyes being closed, my experience is that whether a photo is ‘good’ is very subjective. At the end of the day, a photo is like a piece of art. Our opinions differ and no one is wrong. If humans can’t agree on which photo is best, how can an AI tool always choose the ‘right’ one?
3. Photo Metadata still requires some manual intervention. Metadata is the information that is baked into a digital file that provides us with data about the file, such as the date the photo was taken, the location, and the keywords/tags that help you search for a photo. It’s today’s version of writing on the back of your photo. The benefit of having meaningful and accurate metadata is that it helps to tell the story of the photo for future generations and it documents history.
AI uses the metadata of a photo to do its thing and without it, its effectiveness is limited. For example:
AI is not going to magically know the real date of a scanned photo. You need to manually add the correct date to the photo file or it will use the date it was scanned.
Most programs don’t automatically add keywords…yet. Being able to search for a photo by a keyword/tag is a nice thing. However, currently, you have to manually add keywords to photos in most photo organizing programs, even if it ‘knows’ by the content that it is a beach photo.
Features like location tracking must be turned on to work. There are ways, like turning on location tracking on your smartphone, to automatically add metadata to your photos. However, if it’s not turned on by the user, the AI tool doesn’t work.
4. AI is not perfect. I’m excited about the future, but currently, AI tools make mistakes. For example,
With facial recognition, you need to teach the system to recognize which brother is Joe and even when you do, it will still get it wrong sometimes.
When deduplicating your photo collection, the software doesn’t always catch every duplicate, including things that you think it should. This is getting better and better, but the tiniest of differences in your photos can throw off your deduplication software. With this said, it is still by far the fastest way to deduplicate a library.
When searching on themes, it tries, but it makes mistakes. For example, outside winter play can look a lot like a ski hill.
I’m optimistic that AI in the photo organizing world is only going to get better and make our jobs easier, and that’s exciting.
However, I also believe that when you are documenting your family’s memories and legacy, we can’t rely 100% on the magic of technology.
Preserving and sharing our family’s memories requires human intervention, from making sure that our digital memories are safe and secure, to finding the best ways to share our family’s stories. Without these things, we either literally lose the memories and the history they hold, or we lose the opportunity to build relationships with one another.
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Holly Corbid is the Founder/Owner of Capture Your Photos, where we help you to organize, preserve, and share your lifetime of memories. Helping you touch hearts with your photos is our passion. We specialize in digital photo organization and work remotely with clients all over the country.
Find us at www.captureyourphotos.com or contact us here.