New Profile Picture Editor. OMG, my profile picture needs a makeover! As of this writing, the #1 top-ranking free app overall in both Google Play and the App Store in the US is the New Profile Picture Editor app from Vicman, the developers behind Photo Lab and past presenters at Visual 1st. Leveraging some of the company’s signature AI-based cartoon and trendy art effects, this recently launched app caters to an often ignored use case: profile pictures on social media that should look cool, draw attention, and be easy to change on a regular basis.

Instagram. OMG: NFTs! Remember Instagram was all about adding pastel filters to make the mediocre photos taken with your iPhone 4 look artsy? Well, years went by, we knew it would be coming, and now we know the testing will start this week: Instagram (and soon Facebook) users will be able to display their NFT on their profile and soon also as part of AR superimposed onto their physical surroundings. And of course, selling these NFTs is soon to follow, we expect. Hack, even Starbucks announced they will offer NFTs.

Tokyo Institute of Technology. Lensless camera. How small could a camera without lens be? Super small, so you could imagine the benefits ranging from much thinner smartphones to spy-like ultra-miniature cameras. Researchers of the Tokyo Institute of Technology have published a new approach to pursue this holy grail: in lieu of a lens that focuses light on the image sensor to produce a sharp image, a lensless camera encodes light and then uses a novel machine learning technique called Vision Transformer to reconstruct in real-time a blurry, out-of-focus image into a high-quality image. 

Cameo. Flash in the pan or just recalibrating? Celebrity video shout-out app Cameo lays off 25% of its employees, interestingly, including its CTO, CPO and SVP Marketing. Last year Cameo raised $100M at a $1B+ valuation so you’d expect there’d still be something in their coffers. Down and out? Not at all, according to its CEO. The company also announced a partnership with Snap, which will let Snapchat video advertisers pair up with Cameo talent partners to create custom short-form video ads for Snapchat. Going forward, the company wants to “nurture newer business segments like Cameo for Business, Represent and web3 that we believe will be as big as the core business that put us on the map.”

Zenfolio & Format. Pro photographers and video. Zenfolio and Format, the website-building platform and marketplace for photographers company that Zenfolio acquired last fall, released their 2022 State of the Photography Industry Report. This report is based on a survey among 3,398 photographers, of which 71% were fulltime or parttime self-employed photographers from 97 countries. I found the slides related to these photographers’ adoption of video most interesting. 35% of the respondents provide both photography and videography service to their clients. 89% of those take the videos themselves; only 11% outsources the video production. Which markets are most inclined to use these photographers’ video services? More than 50% of the photographers catering to the commercial, fashion, and documentary markets say they provide both photography and video services to these markets. The markets least into using video services are family, baby and boudoir photography, i.e. fewer than 25% of the photographers report offering both still and video to these markets. The survey report is free to download here.

Colorful, née zerolens. Public beta. Last year’s Visual 1st Best of Show Award winner zerolens now launched a public beta of its 3D synthetic image creation app. At the same time the company and app are renamed to Colorful. Colorful enables users to create photo-realistic renderings of objects, add lighting and combine elements into 3D scenes. As a browser-based app, Colorful lends itself well for collaborative teamwork.

1. We started easy: Yes, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp have in common that they are all owned by Meta. Note that Instagram was Meta’s top app for the third straight quarter, ranking above the Facebook app. While Instagram’s installs were down 7% quarter-over-quarter, it was still the app’s second-best quarter since at least 2014, according to SensorTower.

2. TikTok surpassed 3.5 billion all-time downloads in Q1, becoming just the 5th app (and the only one not owned by Meta) to cross this threshold. No app has had more downloads than TikTok since the start of 2018. 

3. For 19 of the 20 most downloaded apps, photos and/or videos are essential to their success. There are more ways of doing this, but I’d classify them as follows:

UGC social networks: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest

e-Commerce: Shopee (most popular in South East Asia), Meesho (India), Amazon, SHEIN (fashion, China & beyond)

Messaging: WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, WhatsApp Business

Music: Spotify (think album art)

Video streaming: Zoom, Netflix, YouTube

Video editing: CapCut

The 20th app that doesn’t cater to a use case for which visuals are essential is Truecaller, a caller ID/blocking app. But… wait! Even with its main use case so far removed from imaging, this app does offer a feature called Video Caller ID, which is advertised as: “Delight your friends and family on Truecaller with a short selfie video when you call them next.”

In short: visuals have never been so essential for such a variety of use cases. It’s up to all of us in the photo and video industry to be cognizant of, contribute to, and monetize these use cases!

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