Today’s consumers need the ability to locate relevant photos in their ever-expanding collections. Respondents in our survey assessed solutions for these needs to be valuable but mostly unavailable in the marketplace. While some image-recognition solutions cater to these consumer needs, others focus on the needs of advertisers and ecommerce vendors, who benefit from providing suggestions and links that are aware of image content, similar to how they have also leveraged the analysis of social media texts for advertising and sales purposes. We believe the consumer-driven needs, coupled with the resources and motivation of the advertising-focused social media companies, will provide the image-recognition cross-market breakthroughs that requirements in asset management and stock photos, retail, health care, manufacturing and robotics, and security — or academia — have failed to deliver.

Those consumer offerings will build on academic deep-learning technology, which uses neural networks and massive computing power to create and refine image-recognition algorithms. Image recognition is not yet at the level of voice recognition or OCR and its accuracy varies widely, but given the fast progress, we expect it to get there for most use cases in the next 12 to 36 months. Non-consumer sectors should monitor and adopt the technologies driven by these innovations.

Further progress around image recognition will come from:

•          Developing training sets for more classification categories

•          Leveraging additional data sources

•          Optimizing photos prior to image recognition

•          Expanding beyond identifying objects or people

We believe that image recognition will have a considerable impact on many markets, in particular:

• Consumer photo organizing. Image recognition gives new photo-organizing services the opportunity to replace traditional photo-organizing tools.
• Photo services. Image recognition benefits the photo-output industry, as it enables consumers, who are increasingly overwhelmed by the sheer number of their dispersed photos, to still find the pictures worth printing. It also provides opportunities for newcomers in the micro or UGC stock-photo markets to compete with incumbents who still rely on traditional photo-organizing methods.
• Web and mobile advertising and ecommerce. With consumers paying attention to UGC photos, image recognition enables advertisers and ecommerce providers to place content-sensitive links on or near photos.
• Enterprise asset management. Image recognition provides enterprises the tools to track the use of their branded assets in social media so that they can determine the effectiveness of their campaigns or any misuse of their visual assets.

 Feature image courtesy Flickr user Lubomir Panak

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With camcorders, creating a polished movie worth sharing took much more time, effort, and skill than enhancing and sharing photos — even with easy video editing programs like iMovie. Most consumers lack the artistry to marry shooting video with high production values, editing, music, and dialogue to create a compelling narrative. This imbalance restricted taking video to special occasions and to use by dedicated prosumer hobbyists.

Now, video cameras have become ubiquitous on mobile phones, and short-form video apps like Vine and Instagram are familiarizing consumers with the concept of taking video anytime, anywhere. With easy-to-use tools from the likes of Animoto and Magisto arriving in an evolving ecosystem, longer, story-driven personal video is poised to take off. If the following take hold, adoption of personal video will match that of photo sharing:

• In terms of video capture, short-form video taken on smartphones is booming. The line between video and photos is blurring: Consumers can take photos and videos at the same time, and extract high-resolution photos from video footage post-recording. For actual usage to blur, the industry must educate customers that they can capture photos and video simultaneously, rather than having to choose between the two media types.
• Video enhancement solutions have made huge strides recently. Video editing no longer requires a substantial learning curve. Some apps or websites let consumers create an edited and professional looking multimedia video literally within minutes. Going forward, these automatic video enhancement solutions must be better integrated with action cam footage and viral sharing — they’re starting to get good at photo and music integration already.
• Video sharing on the smartphone is starting to trend toward “here-and-now sharing,” with the consumer recording and enhancing the video on the same device. That would accelerate if users get more selective sharing options — beyond mass-posting on YouTube and Facebook, they’ll want to post to specific groups of friends and family, and ad hoc contacts based on vicinity, address book, calendar, and social network data.

Thumbnail image courtesy of flickr user Jami3.org

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With these photos more and more dispersed among multiple devices and online services, traditional desktop software programs (e.g., Picasa, iPhoto) are no longer the end-all photo-organizing solutions. This has opened the way for new solutions focused on tackling the dispersed-photo problem to enter the market.

Some of these solutions exist already, such as those for syncing dispersed documents (such as Dropbox or SkyDrive), and they are now adding photo features. Others are photo-storage or photo-editing solutions (such as Photobucket or Adobe Revel). These are now adding syncing or aggregation functions. Yet other companies are startups (such as Everpix or Pixable) that tackle the dispersed-photo problem from scratch.

In this report, 4 out of the 18 reviewed solution providers have been acquired in the past few months, which is indicative of the investment community’s interest in this space.

Highlights in this report include:

• Solution providers for the dispersed-photo problem are rarely competing head-to-head with one another through identical feature sets.
• The dispersed-photo-problem survey revealed that the largest unmet needs are around backing up and syncing dispersed photos (features we analyze under photo-aggregation methods) as well as finding and browsing photos (analyzed under photo-discovery methods).
• Our solution providers vary in how they aggregate dispersed photos. Eight of them aggregate photos through unidirectional (upload-only) syncing, six do so through bidirectional syncing, and six don’t move the source files but display the photos through links to where they are stored. Some use a combination of all three.
• Solutions that link to source photos don’t sync them or back them up — important unmet user needs, according to our survey. In fact, all but one of the free solutions (Woven) do not sync or back up photos. (Apple’s Photo Stream does sync but only for a limited time and for a limited number of photos.)
• Browsing and finding dispersed photos also fall in the category of unmet user needs. These needs refer to a larger feature set that we classify as photo discovery, which includes automatically categorizing, filtering, and highlighting aggregated photos while leveraging metadata and image-recognition technologies.
• We see many encouraging innovations among the 18 solution providers, but most still fall in the 1.0 category. It is not easy to develop sophisticated image-recognition solutions, and it will take several years before they get to a level that they will see broad acceptance and usage.
• Finally, most solution providers use a subscription model to monetize their services, often while also offering a free version with limited online storage.

At this point few of the unlimited free solutions are deploying any monetization model. Over time, we expect them to experiment with selling add-on services (such as photo-output products) and context-aware advertisements, which could leverage the rich metadata that most dispersed-photo problem-solution providers already capture, coupled with image-recognition data in the future.

These nonsubscription-based monetization models could also be deployed in the free (“lite”) versions of paid solutions or, as is already the case for photo-output products, as add-on services to the paid versions themselves.

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Based on estimates from Xyologic, the top 25 free iPhone apps in this category generated 24 million downloads in August alone. Free photo and video apps for Android had only slightly more downloads.

With low barriers to entry, the photo and video app market also consists of a large number of developers and is certainly not limited to a handful of well-­financed startups: According to 148Apps.biz, the iTunes Store counts 16,924 photo and video apps, and Google Play lists 6,307.

In terms of changes to the photo and video app market: 

• Two-thirds of the 508 top-ranking photo and video apps analyzed in this study have been introduced in just the past 12 months. However, as shown in the section “Photo and video app rankings and analysis,” there are signs that this flood of newcomers making it into the top rankings is diminishing.
• The lucky apps become hits, and some of those companies get acquired. Already we’ve seen four major acquisitions and one substantial investment round since Facebook first announced its plans to acquire Instagram.
• There are indications that filter and effects features are starting to become more of a line item in apps than their main use case. We dive into use cases of the top-ranking apps in the final section of this report.
• Photo and video apps are increasingly turning to alternative monetization methods: More and more now have in-app purchasing options, and some are starting to offer features to order physical photo products in their apps.
• External changes are also having an effect on the photo-app market. With the iPhone 5 relatively new on the market, it is too early to tell how the phone’s enhanced camera, new photo-sharing features, and panorama-photo-taking functions will impact the photo and video app market. Even changes in Facebook’s privacy policy can have a dramatic impact on some apps, as we describe in the next section.

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