We are not to the point where some AI agent is going to be able to do this type of bulk image improvement by a verbal command. I really wanted to be able to just say, “ok computer, edit the photos in this folder to improve them and ping me when you are done.” This use case will probably show up at some point, but now is not that point in the timeline. The future of this type of computer usage is close, but not here just yet.
Over the last couple of weeks, I have spent some time messing around with ways to complete some bulk image improvement via either scripting or applications. It turns out a lot of people use Adobe Lightroom to edit images. Adobe is really spending a lot of time and effort to share the AI powered innovations they have built into the product. Fundamentally, it is not that surprising that Adobe would try to use adoption and the major amount of brand equity they have as a moat to deflect away from the entry of new products into the photo editing process. A lot of room exists for a product to come in and be disruptive in this space.
My use case here is really simple. I want to just have a folder of photos and via either scripting or sharing the folder to an application have those images improved via all these brand new AI tools we keep hearing about. I’m asking for a low friction solution to just have a tool or some tooling do a bit of work to improve the photos being taken. You might be thinking, but I thought Google Photos would basically do this for you if you use that service. It does not really work that way. You can go in and individually update photos with a single click, but it won’t just do the work on the photos in the background. Actually getting Google Photos to work in the background would essentially involve writing scripting to bounce each photo against a vision based API for improvement. That sounds tedious and is not a low friction solution.
Within the marketplace generally a number of things have popped up to compete with the Adobe products including some interesting ones:
Fotor (100 employees, started 2012)
Skylum (150 employees, started 2008)
Searching for Fotor in the Google Play store ended up directing me to something called “AI Photo Editor, Collage-Fotor” which was not what I expected [1]. The installation was clearly a Fotor owned application and it is apparently used by more than 10 million people with a 4.3 out of 5 star review rating. Before using the product I ended up backing out and just searching for “AI photo editor” in Google Play which was interesting [2]. That search produced a ton of options. Way more options that I was expecting to see. I know that a lot of people use smartphones or tablets and don’t really even open a computer to do editor or general computing work. Right now I’m writing this missive on a double monitor desktop setup going in the total other direction of things.
The application based editing route is one thing, but I wanted to see if some other method existed. I had hoped that something in the Google ecosystem would make this task a little bit easier. During the course of a few more searches and looking around I did end up watching this video from Josiah Blizzard who used the Batch AI Adobe Lightroom plugin to edit 1,000 photos per minute. This seemed promising. It was a way more entertaining video that I expected.
I thought it might be interesting to check out a few more videos related to Batch AI on YouTube and was able to find a few different options.
Footnotes:
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.everimaging.photoeffectstudio&hl=en_US&gl=US
[2] https://play.google.com/store/search?q=AI%20photo%20editor&c=apps&hl=en_US&gl=US
What’s next for The Lindahl Letter?
Week 132: Synthetic data notebooks
Week 133: Automated survey methods
Week 134: Make a link based news report automatically
Week 135: Saving some notebooks every day
Week 136: What if July was startup month? 31 days for 31 ideas
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