I just got back from the annual conference of The Photo Managers in Orlando which brings together photo-organizers, archivists, tech companies and all professions and services related to family photos from all over the world. As usual it was a fantastic time to hear  and talk about the latest trends in our field and find out about all the new products and services that will be enhancing the work we do with our clients. I can’t go through all of them, but will mention a few in this newsletter in Part 1 and some more soon in Part 2

I also had the opportunity to do two presentations, one on iMovie, and how to use it to create short video biographies of family members. It’s a great tool and a fantastic way to build a legacy archive of your family history. I also co-presented with my colleague, Paul Einarsen, we talked about different types of photo catalogs; Paul about Apple Photos, and I about Adobe Lightroom.

Apple has some helpful new features: a de-duping tool for you Apple Photos library and Family Sharing for photos now in iCloud, something long requested and now finally here. Lightroom just introduced some AI tools for the masking module as well as a Denoise tool that will clean up high ISO shots nicely. I will talk about the new Apple additions in next month’s newsletter. For more info about the Lightroom’s new tools, see below

Paul and I also spoke about both software in the greater context of how photo catalogs and libraries need to work for us going forward as our photo collections are continuing to grow exponentially and become more difficult to manage.

Not surprisingly, AI was a hot topic, especially in addressing this massive photo growth. Did you know that it is estimated the 1.3 trillion photos will be taken this year? As my mother used to say “oy vay.”

We were introduced to several AI products and services, some that will assist professional photo organizers to do their job faster and more efficiently, and others that will do the same for home users.

IMAIGE is a new service that enables photo organizers to curate and edit down huge photo collections with amazing speed and accuracy. My feeling is it still will need the human touch to do the best and most thorough job, but like many of the AI products I saw, they are amazing assistants that do a large amount of the intensive labor to start, and then allow for fine tuning and tweaking to be done to finish the job.

GoodOnes is a nifty AI app for your smart phone that does the same thing, it culls and edits down your camera roll to three categories: the Best, the Rest and Trash. Very promising and I’m a sure we will see a number more of these types of AI curation apps in the near future.

One of the most popular new platforms we saw there was a company called Projector. It is an app that goes on your smart TV or Apple TV and allows you to upload and play your home movies. If you have ever tried to do that with YouTube or other platforms, you can get pretty frustrated as a certain amount of both tech savviness and patience is required. This is like clicking on Netflix or Amazon Prime and then seeing all your home movies instead of Hollywood’s.

Related Faces is a service that says it can find the unknown people in your photos. Ever wondered who that person was in your old family photos? This service claims it can find and identify them.

Archival Methods had their usual display of great products, this is my go to place for all things archival.

I was also the happy winner of a brand new Nixplay digital frame in a raffle. If you haven’t tried one yet, digital photo frames offer a fun way to have your favorite photos exhibited around the house. Nixplay is a leader in the field and their frames look and work beautifully.

BTW I am not affiliated with any of these products or services, but I was impressed by what I saw, and I hope they continue to develop and become the best that they can become.

I will cover some of the more great stuff I saw there in a couple of weeks in Part 2.