January 7, 2026
Instagram’s Mosseri: Authenticity Is Becoming Infinitely Reproducible
So what does this mean for all of us? And why are we confused?
Plus industry news from: Captura, Studio Source, xAI, Splat, Waldo, Romangic Labs, VSCO
December 17, 2025
My Single-Item Wishlist for 2026 and what we can learn from the world of cybersecurity
At the Axios AI Summit in San Francisco two weeks ago, three speakers from outside the imaging industry sparked a realization regarding the crisis currently dominating our field: How can we protect ourselves against the explosion of hyper-realistic deepfakes, and how do we verify what is authentic?
Before we dive in, here are the two "sparks" that reframed the problem for me: (…)
December 3, 2025
Avant la lettre: Deepfakes and call for legislation
Deepfakes are new to today's GenAI era? Or new to Photoshop, when this launched 25 years ago?
Think again. (…)
November 19, 2025
Perspective #1: Rediscovering the magic of analog; Insights from the Retro Imaging Panel at Visual 1st;
#2: Canva vs. Adobe: How to compete with free?
And industry news from: Google Photos, DJI, Fujifilm, Insta360, Copyleaks, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Adobe, Synthesia, Facebook
November 5, 2025
What Visual 1st Revealed About the Photography Industry.
Perspective by Paul Melcher.
Also: announcing this year's Visual 1st Award winners: Pika, Design Huddle, GLASS Imaging, Revibes.
October 22, 2025
Pinterest: Cranking out features to limit AI Slop.
GenAI photos & videos can be entertaining, helpful, timesaving, moneysaving – or annoying, misleading, inauthentic, ugly.
As we’ll also discuss in our “The Trust Advantage: In the age of GenAI, using proven Image Authenticity as your competitive edge" panel at Visual 1st, one’s take on GenAI visuals depends a lot on which industry, use case, and user type you’re considering.
For instance, how about a community visual sharing site like Pinterest? (…)
October 8, 2025
Perspective: Slop didn't come from AI. It's always been around.
There’s a lot of AI slop out – and much, much more on the horizon.
There’s slop ranging from Studio Ghibli-style imagery toTilly Norwood (see below), powered by ever-easier and ever more powerful tools coming to market to create GenAI images (such as Google’s Nano Banana) and GenAI videos (see Sora 2). (…)
September 23, 2025
Perspective: The uncomfortable relationship between words and images.
The evolution from cave paintings to written text took millennia. The return journey might just be around the corner.
Human communication began with images. Long before the first written word, our ancestors painted scenes on cave walls, not as decoration, but as visual communication systems that conveyed complex ideas about hunting, social structures, and spiritual beliefs. (…)
September 10, 2025
The iPhone 17: we’re going horizontal – oops, that was last year – no, we’re going vertical now!
Remember the iPhone 16 announcements, exactly one year ago? From a photography perspective, the most exciting iPhone 16 feature was Camera Control, the name of a hardware button that controlled the camera like a traditional shutter on top of the iPhone when holding it in landscape mode. Why exciting? Well, you could hold the phone with two hands just like a digital camera! (…)
August 27, 2025
My 5 takeaways from Google’s Pixel 10 announcements
It’s the chips, baby.
Tensor G5.
I’ve said it before: the race for the best smartphone for photographers is no longer defined by the most impressive sensor specs – it’s the advanced chips that drive the next generation of AI features that ultimately matter most.
So it’s no surprise that last week's announced Pixel 10 phones are powered by a new & shiny Tensor chipset, (…)
August 13, 2025
Photo & Video Industry News Perpectives
With news from OpenAI, Popsa, Let's Enhance, Topaz Labs, Higgsfield AI, MyHeritage, Ancestry, iMemories, and Cassette. (…)
July 30, 2025
Photo & Video Industry News Perspectives
With news from Imagen, Insta360, Adobe, IPI, The Photo Managers, PODJumper, VSCO, Google, Gelato, Printbox, and Vogue. (…)
July 16, 2025
Photo & Video Industry News Roundup –
H1 articles and company index
July 2, 2025
The Line We Haven’t Drawn: What Makes an Image AI-Generated?
As generative AI continues to infiltrate everything from smartphone cameras to image editors, one deceptively simple question remains unresolved and increasingly urgent: How much AI involvement is enough to call something AI-generated?
It is not just a technical question or a legal one. It is a question about truth, trust, and the very language we need to navigate a future in which “real” becomes negotiable. (…)
June 18, 2025
WWDC – and much more photo & video industry news.
With news from Apple, Google, Insta360, Pearla, Snapseed, Popsa, Adobe, Pika, Snapchat, Shutterstock, and NoMoreCopyrights. (…)
June 4, 2025
Fujifilm’s X innovative X half camera – but what does it have to do with camping?
Fujifilm has unveiled the X half, a new digital compact camera inspired by half-frame cameras (film cameras capable of shooting at half the size of 35 mm film). For those of us who've been vocal about the lack of innovation among camera vendors, it seems the times are changin’. (…)
May 22, 2025
Visual 1st 2025: program contour, confirmed presenters.
With photo & video industry news from Google I/O, Flam, GLASS Imaging, Sigma, Leica Camera AG, IMG.LY, Instagram, Wix, and Apple.
May 7, 2025
Agentic vs. Generative AI for photos and videos: that’s the question. But what’s the difference anyway?
Agentic AI is the hot new buzzword in today’s tech world, and guess what? It's starting to pop up in our photo and video world as well (for instance, it was the topic of much conversation at the recent Adobe Max conference in London).
April 23, 2025
Today’s pro photographers: 6 key findings from Zenfolio’s State of the Photography Industry survey
Past Visual 1st presenter Zenfolio has shared the results of their 6th annual State of the Photography Industry survey, conducted in collaboration Format, ShootProof, and Professional Photographers of America (PPA).
The survey garnered over 4,500 responses from professional photographers across 70 countries, with North Americans comprising 79% of the participants. (…)
April 9, 2025
The Silent Collapse: Generative AI’s Erosion of Photo Licensing Revenue
Is the GenAI glass half full or half empty for photo or video solution providers? It depends on who you’re looking at. (…)
March 18, 2025
Visual 1st 2025 – announcing panel topics, confirmed fireside chat presenters, sponsors
Announced fireside chat presenters:
Jim Louderback, Editor and CEO, Inside the Creator Economy
Tom Hughes, CEO, RPI Print
This year’s panel topics include (…)
March 5, 2025
Photoshop on the iPhone – will Adobe finally get it right?
Yah! Adobe launched its iPhone Photoshop app, with an Android version coming soon. But isn’t Photoshop already available on iPhones? Yes, amidst all the marketing hype around this announcement, it’s easy to forget that Adobe already brought Photoshop to iPhones years ago. They launched Photoshop Express in 2010 and added Photoshop Touch in 2011, but neither app was a success. (…)
February 19, 2025
Rounding up a barrage of "GenAI for visuals" announcements
Since our last issue there's been a barrage of news and perspectives published around generative AI solutions for creating or editing photos and/or videos. As a number of these GenAI announcements are to some extent related, I’ll focus specifically on GenAI in this issue.
What’s a real photo? One that isn’t fake, right? Or is that a backwards approach? In any case, are tech standards enough? (…)
February 5, 2025
AI's next leap forward: Agentic AI. How about first getting your feet wet with agentic AI research?
Much of today’s AI innovation wave started in our imaging industry when neural networks were trained in identifying images based on training sets of previously tagged images. Much of the generative AI innovation in recent years also centered around images – in this case being created by neural networks responding to text prompts. As we all know, generative AI has since proliferated way beyond image generation, including the creation of text, music, video or even computer code.
Today’s buzz du jour is agentic AI (…)
January 22, 2025
InkPoster: an existential threat to printed wall décor, digital photo frames, or neither?
During COVID, I’ve stopped attending CES and have not returned since. Any innovative announcements related to the photo or video industry can be easily watched or read online, and frankly fewer and fewer industry buddies have shown up at CES in the last few years, so that's not a reason to attend either.
No reason at all then to be there in person? Well, this year there was one exception. I would have loved to inspect the display quality of InkPoster, the digital art frame launched at CES that uses display technology to give digital images the appearance of having been printed on paper.
January 8, 2025
Getty & Shutterstock – the wisdom behind merging industry giants
Addressing the stock media market challenges or squeezing out money while they can?
How do CEOs and investment bankers spend their Christmas holidays? Most often, it’s the usual: spending time with the family, or escaping the family and go golfing with their buddies, or reading up on business strategy books to sound smart when back in the office. But occasionally, it’s the adrenaline-filled all-nighters to close a once in a lifetime transaction that will forever upend their industry. (...)
Check out our older articles here.
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