The 9 Lessons that 3 Big Changes + 16 years in the Photo Industry has taught me
As of last week, I celebrated 16 years in the photo business. This industry has changed dramatically over the years. What once centered around printed albums and shoeboxes of photos is now shaped by smartphones, cloud storage, AI tools, and overwhelming digital clutter. As I’ve watched these shifts unfold, I’ve learned some important lessons about managing, preserving, and touching hearts with our photos.
Here are the three biggest shifts I’ve witnessed in the photo industry over the past 16 years and the lessons they’ve taught me.
1. Smartphones Changed Everything
Today, everyone carries a camera in their pocket at all times. We’ve gone from using our cameras to capture memories, to using them to manage day-to-day life. While amazing in some ways, it has created a new challenge: overwhelm. We’re taking and keeping far too many photos.
2. Cloud Services Became the Norm
Cloud storage didn’t become mainstream until the mid-2010s. Since then, there’s been an industry wide learning curve. With so many platforms available, many people now have photos scattered across multiple services without fully understanding where everything is stored. We’ve also seen major companies change policies, limit storage, or leave the space altogether, reminding us why relying on a single platform can be risky.
3. Paperless Living Has Changed Memory Preservation
Paperless is more the norm than the exception, which means that if we want future generations to pass along our family stories and memories, the best gift we can give our families is to scan and digitize our favorite old printed photos and albums. Just as important is creating a long-term digital legacy plan so your memories live on after you’re gone.
9 Lessons I’ve Learned in 16 years as a Photo Manager
The best thing you can do for your collection is get it into one place so it can be backed up, even if you are backing up the mess.
We HAVE to get better at managing the number of photos we take and keep. Deleting photos and reducing the clutter has never been more important. Your children and grandchildren are not going to sift through thousands of your photos when you don’t even want to.
Every person should own a full resolution copy of their photos. Cloud services are great for backup and accessing your memories from multiple places, but they shouldn’t be the one and only place your memories live.
One photo can touch a heart…while it’s nice to have an organized collection, don’t let disorganization stop you from sharing meaningful memories with the people you love.
Photos build relationships. Sharing a meaningful photo whether it is via text or a thoughtfully created album full of photos creates emotional connection and gives us a little boost of oxytocin.
Artificial Intelligence has arrived in the photo world and I encourage you to lean in, BUT while it can do great things like help us remove duplicates and find photos, it can’t tell you which photos matter most to YOU.
Dates are wily on digital photos and videos and in the age of AI automation, accurate dates matter more than people realize because they allow systems to help you organize your memories. Scanned photos are dated the day they were scanned, and downloaded social media photos most often take on the date they were downloaded. Correcting dates (even if you just get the year - or decade for older photos) may feel overwhelming, but it’s one of the best things you can do to archive your collection for future generations.
If we don’t take the time to preserve our memories and tell our family stories in a way that future generations will be able to access and share them, they will get lost in the digital universe. Creating a legacy collection in a format that can be passed on is a beautiful gift.
Every client and every collection is unique. The time it takes to organize a collection is as unique as the journey it took to create it…but 100% worth it!
Overwhelmed with the thought of finding photos for a project? Getting started organizing your photos can be the hardest part! Grab our FREE GETTING STARTED GUIDE that includes tips for how to create a plan, how to take inventory of your collection, and provides the form to do it.
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.
Looking for a DIY solution? Check out our series of online courses, The Photo Organizing Blueprint.
Find us at www.captureyourphotos.com or contact us here.