Welcome to 2024.

If 2023 was the appetizer, then ‘24 is the main course.

Digital asset management, which includes photo management software, generated $2.6 billion in 2020, on the way to an estimated $8.1 billion by 2026. No matter how you slice it, photo management is becoming part of our daily lives like the mobile phone that delivered it. Just as we are never out of touch, we are also never without a camera, and the trillions of photos now taken annually need, somehow, to be managed for us to enjoy.

Developers took notice. And last year became the software equivalent of America’s Got Talent for photography apps of all types. Image editing apps. Retouching apps. Apps to find duplicates, blurred, and redundant photos that snuck into your camera roll.

There’s location triage. Face detection. Smart exposure adjustment and background removal. Skin softening and blemish removal. Heck, even people removal along with awkward light poles, cars, and tattoos. Tasks that were only offered by highly skilled photo retouchers back in the day are now available to anyone for a few bucks per month.

Now, this isn’t all that new, you say.

Yes, great retouching and adjustment apps have been around for years. Photoshop can do pretty much anything retouching-wise, but it’s a professional grade tool that takes a powerful computer, lots of storage space and a YouTube account (or willing teenager) for the average person to understand and use.

And that’s been the state of photo editing software for decades. The best photo apps have been developed and sold to professionals and enthusiasts with the overhead of steep learning curves and the need for pro level hardware to support them.

But that changed in 2023 with the addition of useable A.I. - artificial intelligence - to guide and speed up photo editing tasks that had been largely digital adaptations of long-established analog (film based) tasks. Tricks like removing a background went from tediously-make-a-perfect-mask-in-Photoshop-and-remove-everything-but-the-subject to click-this-button. A.I. found its way into old tools and new to bring advanced photo editing to the masses.

But the real winners on stage last year were all about photo management.

Photo management apps - the software we use to organize, curate, and share all those photos - are the foundation of a happy photo/video experience. You can’t enjoy your pictures if you can’t find them. And analog organizing wisdom - tagged files in folders - can only scale so far before it becomes overwhelming. With personal photo libraries regularly topping 100k images, maintaining the system is time consuming and tedious, to say the least.

The obvious solution has been search based organizing, using the data that the camera creates in each digital photo/video. Date and time. Maybe even location. Which is basically how we’ve organized photos since the first Kodak Brownie. But in the digital universe, we can quickly search instead of browsing through a shelf full of shoe boxes. Or swiping until our finger cramps.

And you can upgrade the searchibility with additions like custom file names, captions, and keywords to the photo. This is the world of professional photo managers; making your pictures easily accessible in a variety of ways, along with reducing clutter, removing duplicates, and curating events.

But like any task, it takes time and intention to pull it off well and set up your collection of photos for long term enjoyment. It’s one thing to caption or add keywords as you go, but quite another to be faced with a backlog of tens of thousands of photos over a lifetime that need to be caught up and labeled. Like trying to get your email to inbox zero.

But as it did with photo editing, A.I. made photo management more accessible to average users and it showed up last year in a collection of new and updated apps for mobile and desktop devices. Apps that feature object recognition, smart tagging, decluttering assist, “best shot” evaluation, auto grouping, and more.

To be sure, not all of the solutions are ready for prime time, but if the development of text based A.I. is any indicator, it’s almost certain that 2024 will see imaging A.I. become a reliable and necessary tool for the mainstream photo management experience.

Even more important is that photo management software is finally getting the attention it deserves from innovative developers who want to reinvent the photo experience itself. We know how the choice of picture frame can change the impact of a wall print. So it is with software. As philosopher Marshall McLuhan said years ago: “The medium is the message.” And a clever, more engaging, more user-friendly viewing experience makes for more exciting pictures.

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Apple Photos, and it continues to be the gold standard for easy management and presentation of your photos and videos. If you have an iPhone and are all Apple, using Apple Photos for your pictures is a no-brainer. It offers a stellar user experience and built in security for your photos.

But there are people who want something else.

Maybe they want a more folder-like organizing metaphor. Or they distrust iCloud. Perhaps they want to split up their collection into personal, work, and shared photos. Or they have pictures already committed to multiple devices and apps on more than one platform - Mac, Windows, iOS or Android.

For years, that void has been wanting for a champion, something more robust and flexible than Apple Photos, but still accessible to the casual photo crowd. A powerful app with the developer’s commitment and support to build an active ongoing community of users.

It’s been a hard act to follow, given Apple’s deep pockets and all the features Apple has built in over the years. A few promising challengers, for sure, but nothing close to the Apple Photos experience, with the possible exception of Adobe Lightroom, the cloud-based version of Lightroom Classic. Lightroom was a clear acknowledgment of a user base that was progressively mobile and wanted a modern, feature-rich, but easy to use photo management solution. Until recently, though, Lightroom has always felt closer to its namesake, Lightroom Classic, and the other Adobe professional media apps than as an option for the new-to-photography crowd attracted by the iPhone and the Apple Photos ecosystem.

The thing is that as the sheer number of photos grows every year, photo management has moved from search based organizing being handy to it being essential.

The challenge is that a great photo collection needs not just order, but context. Albums and folders can do that. The chronology is important. And having a location gets you halfway there. If there are known people in the shots, then you’re even better off. That’s the foundation of any modern photo management solution.

But context - the what, why, and how of it all - is the wild card of photo management. All the stuff that used to be scrawled on the back of the photo. It’s the most elusive part of the equation; the soul of the image itself. The reason it even exists. When they say “a picture is worth a thousands words” at least half of those are context.

And five hundred words times tens of thousands of photos is a mind-numbingly huge task. Overwhelming.

That’s where A.I. comes in.

To be clear, this is not R2D2 level intelligence, but it promises to make the task of photo management much less daunting and more efficient by filling in some of the context we’ve always had to add manually.

For example, If I search on “beach vacation” my Apple Photos Library shows me all the photos and moments that fit, even though I haven’t added either one as a tag. Photos knows where the pictures were taken by the GPS location (at or near a beach) and assumes that photos taken in places other than my home (which is also near a beach) are on vacation.

Object recognition adds another layer of context. Another “beach” search will find hundreds of photos taken on a camera with no GPS coordinates because the app just knows what a beach looks like. Weddings, camping, sailing and party identification are just part of the whole A.I. toolbox, along with recognition for tens of thousands of objects. Even famous landmarks are fair game. Taken a step further, A.I. can evaluate composition and visual properties of an image to suggest improvements or find similar photos.

All of which is getting us closer and closer to a photo viewing experience that is less like flipping through a filing cabinet and more like a Google search to pull up the part of our story we’re looking for. It’s exciting stuff.

What’s the end game?

If you’ve used the Memories feature in Apple Photos you’ve had a sample of what that might be. Memories draws on everything to proactively create slideshows around a theme. It could be an anniversary or wedding. A friendship over the years. A family pets sampler. Of a favorite vacation. Generally, Memories videos are a long ago moment you’d forgotten about or a collection over time that you wouldn’t have taken the time to curate yourself. They pop up when you least expect them to add some surprise and delight to your day. Memories are kind of a “This is your Life” teaser. And I think that of all the uses I’ve seen showcased for A.I. it is one of the best.

If you’ve been needing a photo collection makeover and haven’t been able to face it, this may be the time to get it going with new tools at your disposal.

If you are up to date, keep your eye open for new features that would enhance the photo experience for you and your family.

It’s coming to a device near you.

What do you think? Have you tried any new photo software you really love? Is there an A.I. component that really works for you? Please join the chat and let me know.

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