2025 Tech Trends & Artificial Intelligence: What it Means for Your Photos

Are you wondering how to keep up with the latest in technology? In this post, we'll guide you through the latest tech trends and how AI is reshaping the way we store and interact with our family photos.

The Shift Away from Traditional Storage

Firstly, let's talk about the phasing out of conventional hardware. Remember USB drives? They're becoming obsolete as newer computers no longer feature USB ports. This shift might seem minor, but it's indicative of broader changes in how we manage data.

The Push for Cloud Storage

Big tech companies like Microsoft and Apple are heavily promoting cloud storage solutions: OneDrive for Windows users, which often installs sneakily, prompting users to back up their folders to the cloud. iCloud for Mac users, subtly suggesting automatic backups to Apple's servers. These services are not just for storage; they're gateways for AI to interact with your data. While user agreements might protect your content, the vast amount of data processed by these platforms could potentially feed into their AI learning algorithms.

AI Everywhere

AI's integration into everyday tools is now profound: Microsoft's Copilot - Now included in Microsoft 365, it can draft entire documents or assist with tasks directly in apps like Word. Apple Intelligence - Though you need to opt-in, it's a personal AI system deeply integrated into your Mac's functionality, enhancing tasks from simple searches to complex data analysis in photos.

These AI systems learn from every interaction, improving their capabilities. The more you use them, the better they get, but also, the more they know about you through your data.

AI in Your Photos

For years, artificial intelligence has been analyzing your photos by the big tech companies from Apple, Google to Amazon and more. Some of the resulting features are helpful, some are amazing and some might be worrisome for privacy and security purposes.

  1. Photo Sorting and Recognition: Tools like Apple Photos or Google Photos use AI for facial recognition and object identification, making it easy to search for photos by content. 
  2. Editing and Enhancement: AI-driven features like Google's Magic Eraser or Adobe's ability to process thousands of images at once for adjustments showcase how far AI has come in enhancing our photos.
  3. Creating New Images: Features like Google Pixel's Best Take or AI on platforms like X (with Grok) can even generate new images from your descriptions, blurring the lines between reality and digital creation. Even the photo for this blog post is AI generated!
  4. The Rise of Mobile Scanning Apps like Photomyne and My Heritage are pushing for mobile photo scanning, offering quick solutions for digitizing old photos. However, for those seeking higher quality, traditional scanners are still superior, but AI is making mobile options more appealing with features like colorization and animation of old photos.
  5. Computers May Be on the Outs - I've seen hints that some tech companies are focusing resources on mobile phone apps and a shift away from computers. In the future, it's possible the home computer may become a thing of the past. 

For this reason, we need to start and complete our photo saving projects as soon as possible.

Preparing for the Future: Your Photo Estate

Given these trends, we recommend creating a photo estate so that all of your photos live in one folder and are backed up with the 3-2-1 Strategy - two copies in your home (original on computer and a copy on an external hard drive) and then a copy stored in the cloud. We recommend FOREVER Permanent Storage.

 

Watch our full video on 2025 Tech Trends by clicking on the image below.

Visit thepixplan.com to learn more about how we help people save their photos.