We’re a few weeks before the storm: the annual tech product pre-holiday announcement season that will be upon us.

In the meantime, here is my grab of this week’s photo or video technology news that stands out:

Shopify & TikTok. Social commerce. Through a new partnership, TikTok and Shopify merchants who participate in a pilot program will be able to add a shopping tab to their TikTok profiles and posts. Shopify says it expects to expand the feature to all of its merchants this fall.

You’ll hear more about social commerce and the importance of empowering merchants through visual assets in our Visual 1st Moving Beyond Consumers – When Businesses Seek DIY Photo Solutions panel with participation of Matt Henry, Shopify’s Staff Creative Producer.

Adobe & Frame.io. Acquisition. Collaborative video editing and workflow optimization is the next frontier for pro video editing — so Adobe knocked on Frame.io's door. Which was opened for $1.28B.

A special congratulations to Itai Tsidon, co-founder of Lightricks and fireside chat presenter at our Visual 1st 2018 conference, who recognized the potential of Frame.io early on, invested in the startup and served in their Board.

Pinterest. Inclusive hair types. Pinterest is adding search filters for different hair textures. When users search for hairstyles, new filter options — for coily, curly, wavy, and straight textures, as well as shaved / bald and protective styles — will appear under the search bar. The filters should be particularly useful for people of color looking for styles tailored to their hair textures, and Pinterest says they were created with Black, brown, and Latinx people in mind.

Facebook. More video on its way. Following Instagram’s shift to video and its Instagram Reels feature, Facebook will begin testing Facebook Reels, which will give Facebook users the ability to create and share short-form video content directly within the News Feed or within Facebook Groups. 

Zenfolio. More for Pros. Zenfolio launches a new ProSuite plan for advanced professional photographers. ProSuite offers 1TB of storage, includes an easy-to-use website builder, interactive photo galleries, e-commerce solutions and workflow automation. Photographers also have access to customer relationship management (CRM) tools, including booking, real-time scheduling, invoice tools, payment options and automatic fulfillment for orders.

PicUP.Ai. Fixing that old photo. Visual 1st sponsor PicUp.AI announces new photo restoration tools/APIs for enhancing low-resolution, blurred, pixelated, old or damaged photos. 

NPD. Revenge travel triggers sales. What is the impact of us as consumers reengaging with the experience economy, and again participating in travel, outdoor events, and other communal gatherings that were curtailed in 2020? Well, we buy more tech products, including mirrorless cameras and even the too soon written off category of point-and-shoot cameras. 

Check out this article from Ben Arnold, Executive Director & Consumer Technology Industry Analyst at The NPD Group, and join us at Visual 1st on Oct. 19-20 for his deep-dive in our New needs, new cameras fireside chat session.
 
Milk Video. New Templates & new $. Collaborative video editor Milk Video is launching a template builder for organizations to create customizable Design Templates. Template builders users can assign different customization permissions for different video layers, e.g. they might prohibit users to change background styles, while allowing them to change titles, video clip or captions.

Milk Video will be demoed in one the DIY Video Summit Show & Tell sessions. Separately, the startup also announced seed stage funding of $1.5M from Hubspot co-founder, Dharmesh Shah, and Y Combinator.

TikTok. Going AR. Facebook and Snap: you saw it coming, but still… Short-form video juggernaut TikTok launches a creative toolset called TikTok Effect Studio, currently in private beta testing, which will allow its own developer community to build AR effects for TikTok’s short-form video app. In other words, like Facebook and Snap, TikTok is now also betting on AR by offering tools that allow developers to build out AR experiences and features for its apps.

Capsule. 2.0 Video. Short-form video creator, Capsule launches version 2.0 with a slew of new features, including responsive video (exporting to any aspect ratio), easy embedding of Capsule videos in other websites, and a redesigned dashboard that includes features to moderate content and various settings for publishing the videos.