Fostering Photo Print Partnerships Spotlight takeaways

– When doing it all yourself doesn’t make sense 

Many thanks to last week’s Visual 1st Spotlight speakers, who shared their perspectives on the do’s and don’ts of partnering in the photo print production value chain + to Gary Pageau for his expert panel moderation! Below are my takeaways.

Fostering Photo Print Partnerships

– When doing it all yourself doesn’t make sense 

Partnering makes sense if …

…You’ve determined that your company’s core competency/DNA/passion/USP is in other areas than the areas that could very well be catered to by partners. 

But our speakers stressed that your partnering needs could also change over time: for instance, when you determine that your area of focus should be developing and marketing a scalable B2C photo print app (as brought up by B2C photo print app provider Persnickety Box) or innovating the wall décor framing tech (B2B & B2C wall décor provider, XPozer) rather than being distracted by the logistics of doing your own print manufacturing. Or conversely, you might decide to focus more on print manufacturing for B2B customers and expanding your B2C brand rather than continuing to develop all software/apps yourself (B2B and B2C photo print product provider, ORWO Net).

Partnering does not make sense if …

…There’s no solid commitment from the partner in terms of resources and efforts (brought up by B2B middleware company, Mediaclip). There’s usually not a lack of potential partners who like to work with you but if there’s no skin in the game, they might be gone in no time if other opportunities arise – and you’ve wasted your resources and efforts.

…You feel that the solution you need is so crucial to your business success that you simply need to have complete control over it and do it yourself, for instance, when you have specific needs for quality, turnaround time, customer support, or costs.

…Or if you feel you need to have a direct line of engagement with the partner who delivers the actual solution, i.e. your partner can’t be the middleman, or third-party print services or software aggregator.

Partnering requires good communication

Like any partnership, good communication between business partners is essential. Things will go wrong at some point. Or your requirements change. Or your partner feels the need to start outsourcing (part of) the solution they’ve been providing to you. Or your partner is moving in different business directions and there is no longer the initial good fit. Or they will start serving your arch competitor. And so on.

What makes good communication with business partners? According to our speakers, the communication should be honest (no excuses), open & upfront (to learn about mishaps as early as possible, so that you could still mitigate them), and personal (have a personal connection with your partner’s stakeholders).

Some items are non-negotiable with photo print partners

According to our speakers: the quality of the product or service (brought up by everyone), turnaround time (brought up multiple times, but most strongly by B2C greeting card provider, MyPostcard), customer service, backup broadband, being able to address the full range of your product’s specs (brought up by B2C photobook provider, Journi), and the partner’s willingness to share their settings with other providers if needed.

And then there’s that pesky question of pricing...

While important, the partner’s pricing should not be the first thing on your – and your partner’s – agenda. In fact, several of our speakers stressed that potential partners who start their approach by highlighting their pricing, are per definition suspect. Fees should only be negotiated once you’ve determined that their capabilities meet your requirements, our speakers agreed. 

And one aside: that market segment that was never on your radar screen – jail mail

Sending personalized greeting cards to inmates is not an insignificant use case (one addressed by MyPostcard), but one that’s much more complex to address than you might have imagined – especially in the US with so many privately owned jails. Each of these could have their own regulations as to what types of greeting cards are acceptable, e.g. whether they prohibit envelopes, color-printed pieces, or physical stamps. 

I salute Oliver and his team for tackling the complexity involved in delivering of what I assume is a highly valued service by the greeting card recipients!

And a few more things...

Meta. Generating AI images is a hornet’s nest, part 2. In our last issue we reported that historical inaccuracies and overly “sensitive” responses forced Google to stop all generation of images of humans in its Gemini chatbot. The stock market was not amused and Google’s stock lost $80 billion in market value — at least temporarily.

Not to be outdone, Meta's Imagine AI image generator now got in hot water as well, as it apparently makes the same kind of historical gaffes. Check out the images:

• When asked for a group of popes, Imagine AI showed Black popes.
• Many of the images of (US) founding fathers included an ethnically diverse group.
• The prompt "a group of people in American colonial times" showed a group of Asian women.
• The prompt for "Professional American football players" produced only photos of women in football uniforms.

EyeQ. Background removal. Past Visual 1st presenter EyeQ announces the addition of a Background Removal module to its Perfectly Clear imaging suite. While background removal is a well-understood use case with many horizontal solutions on the market, EyeQ’s solution specifically targets businesses in the travel, tourism, and attractions sectors, with further improvements in the pipeline, including enhanced quality for green screen extraction in studio portraits.

Re-establishing Trust in Visuals: 

Untangling the potential solutions – from image content credentials to digital certificates, forensic watermarks, deepfake detection, and beyond

April 10, 8:00 – 9:30 am Pacific Time; 5:00 – 6:30 pm CEST

Early Bird Tickets ends March 27.

Speakers to date (stay tuned for updates):

The pervasiveness of AI has radically altered the dynamics of trust in imaging. We’ve gone from time-and-skill consuming cut/paste/rephotographing in the silver halide days, to generating photo-similar representations of anything we can dream up in seconds and on demand. 

There’s broad industry – and even political – consensus that the issue of veracity in imaging is critical for both commercial and societal reasons, but we’re still early on in developing solutions, and there’s much confusion on the potential and limitations of the various approaches ranging from metadata credentials, to watermarking, to deepfake detection. 

In this session we’ll examine what’s being done: 

• To assist content creators to certify that their images are authentic and can be trusted, including with respect to IP. 
• To enable imagery viewers and buyers to ascertain whether the images they’re viewing, or are about to publish under their responsibility, meet the necessary authenticity requirements.

IXXI. Photo print product subscriptions. While many “non-print” photo apps have successfully introduced subscriptions to their apps, subscriptions to photo print products are still few and far between (Persnickety Box, whose founder spoke at last week’s Spotlight, is in the “few” category). IXXI, a B2C photo wall décor provider and previous Visual 1st Spotlight presenter, announces IXXI Play, a subscription plan that includes a mini photobook and IXXI’s signature photo tiles. You pay €19/month or €10 to get the products every other month.

Lightricks. Going GenAI video. Timing a product announcement is a tricky thing. With everyone still swooning over the quality of OpenAI’s Sora GenAI video creation tech, previous Visual 1st presenter Lightricks, the developer behind Facetune and Photoleap, announces a new AI video tool called LTX Studio that can generate characters, scenes, storyboards and even entire movies using only text descriptions. Without Sora entering the GenAI video fray, this would have been a huge announcement, but alas… And yes, the race for GenAI video is on, with Adobe having set eyes on it as well.

Photoroom. 50% unicorn. Congratulations to past Visual 1st presenter, AI ecommerce image creation solution developer Photoroom, who just raised $43M at a $500M valuation. After having launched last year GenAI, which the startup labeled as “the first photo gen AI for businesses” it took the idea to the next level this year by developing Photoroom Instant Diffusion to achieve faster performance. Instant Diffusion is based on an extensive licensed image training set, thus ensuring safety and quality for its customers. And apparently investors like the new tech and Photoroom’s traction in the market.

Lapse. Raising $. How to stand out in the crowd? For one, you could address a true and proven use case in a completely new way. Just like film cameras in the past, the Lapse iOS app lets you take pictures that you have to wait to see “developed,” with no chance of editing and retaking, before you can share them privately with friends or family. Lapse captures 100M photos each month and consistently ranks among the top-10 photography apps in the U.S. app store. No surprise: Lapse just raised $30M, bringing the total to $42M and a valuation of $150M, according to sources.

PiktID. Improved face anonymizing. Last year’s Visual 1st presenter PiktID just launched a yet more accurate version of EraseID, its AI-based technology to anonymize photos by replacing real with with artificially created faces, or to change faces by editing facial expressions, origin, age or hair style. See the progress of EraseID here.

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