Photo Imaging CONNECT: How AI is transforming memory preservation in photo imaging

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the photo-imaging industry, but one of its most compelling applications may be in helping families preserve not just photos, but the stories behind them. That was the key theme of the recent Photo Imaging CONNECT panel discussion featuring Adam Pratt of Chaos to Memories, Sarah Lefebvre of MediaViz AI, and Mitchell Richmond of Kenoke, who explored how AI-powered tools are helping solve one of the industry’s biggest pain points: Overwhelming photo collections.

Pratt, a third-generation photographer and founder of Chicago-based Chaos to Memories, said the biggest challenge facing consumers isn’t scanning old photos—it’s what happens afterward.

“Scanning is awesome and terrible,” Pratt said. “Without curation and organization, you’ve doubled your problem. You had physical chaos, and now you have digital chaos.”

That challenge is growing rapidly. Pratt noted the average client in his business now has approximately 10,000 physical photos and 250,000 digital photos spread across phones, hard drives, old computers, and cloud backups.

To address that issue, scanning and memory-preservation platform Kenoke has partnered with MediaViz AI to bring image intelligence to the digitization process.

MediaViz uses AI to extract metadata from photos—identifying faces, objects, events, image quality, colors, and contextual clues—to organize and categorize large photo libraries automatically. The technology can also group images by life events, suggest the most meaningful photos, and help users search their collections similarly to how smartphone photo apps function.

“We think our AI can get you 95% of the way there,” Lefebvre said. “We don’t want to replace humans—we want to do what would either take an insane amount of time or simply wouldn’t be practical manually.”

The partnership enables Kenoke customers to receive digitized photo collections that are already sorted, searchable, and curated—dramatically reducing the burden of managing thousands of scanned images.

But organization is only the first step.

Kenoke’s platform is built around adding context and storytelling to those photos by prompting users and family members to share memories connected to each image. The goal is to preserve the stories, relationships, and personal meaning behind family photographs before they are lost.

“Once everybody’s gone, what did digitization do at that point?” Richmond said. “It’s just a bunch of photos nobody really cares about because nobody’s here to tell you what they are.”

Kenoke is experimenting with ways to turn those stories into enhanced printed products, including photo books embedded with audio or digital storytelling components, creating richer keepsakes that combine images with recorded memories.

The panel also stressed the importance of using AI thoughtfully. Rather than altering or generating images, MediaViz focuses strictly on analyzing photos without changing them.

“We’re not generating anything,” Lefebvre said. “We’re not touching the physical images. We’re solely pulling the data from them to be used in actionable ways.”

For photo retailers, labs, and imaging providers, the discussion highlighted emerging opportunities to apply similar AI tools to photo books, school photography, DAM systems, and print-product workflows—particularly where image curation and metadata entry remain labor-intensive bottlenecks.

Ultimately, panelists agreed the future of memory preservation lies not just in digitizing photos, but in making them accessible, meaningful, and interactive for future generations.

As Pratt summarized, “These memories feel important to everybody and urgent to nobody—until it’s almost too late.”