Industry News


Lensii AI App Set to Best Instagram at Photo Sharing

November 18, 2021

By Brienne Walsh

Poised to launch in 2022, the Lensii AI app was created to not only help users store and share quality photography, but it could also introduce an opportunity to reform image sharing on social media platforms.

If you feel like Instagram is no longer serving your needs as a photographer, you’re not alone. “Instagram has slowly been moving away from being a photo sharing app, attempting to cater to an audience outside of its original niche with features like reels,” says Sunghoon Park, the founder and CEO of Lensii, an AI-assisted photography library and app that plans on launching in 2022. “There are also algorithms that control what the user sees, and these algorithms seem to prioritize strong emotional reactions over anything else as that’s what drives profits for the Instagram business model.”

[Read: After a Year Off Social Media, I’m Back—Living an Uncurated Life]

The app continues to grow and is expected to account for 52 percent of ad revenue generated by the end of the year by its parent site, Meta, which also owns Facebook. It does so by deepening its focus on video and ecommerce as opposed to still photography and art; in June, Instagram’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, announced that Instagram will focus on developing video content, highlighted by features such as reels, as well as shopping and messaging, going forward. This caused some photographers, seemingly more devout to stills to declare a departure from Instagram for good. At that, certain developers saw opportunities.

[Read: Instagram Subscriptions Could Be Paid Boost Photographers Need]

The Lensii AI app was originally developed as a tool to allow users to upload hundreds of photographs—say, iPhone images from a bachelorette party in New Orleans—and then have those images filtered by an AI rating system that picked out the “best” ones for posting. “If you’re just starting out and don’t quite know what makes a good photo, the AI can tell you if you’re on the right track,” Park explains. The system also works for professional photographers, he adds. “Even if you trust your own eyes more than the AI, you can still save quite a lot of time by asking the AI to filter out any photos that look worse than, say, a rating of 3/10, before you look through them manually.”

Early on, Park realized that allowing users to then share the photographs would not only help train the AI to choose better images, but it could also be an opportunity to reform image sharing on social media platforms.

 “There are just so many people who hate Instagram at the moment, for one reason or another,” Park says. “We felt it would be prudent to take advantage of that now to grow our userbase on the sharing part of the app, since it was something we were planning to add eventually anyway.”

When the Lensii AI app launches, users will be able to post images from their photo library, and then have them subjected to a rating system that allows other users to vote if they are good or not. (Park notes that the rating system is based on the Photo Critique sub-Reddit that allows users to receive formal critique for their images.) Ideally, this ranking system would allow “good” photography, rather than just photography by popular people or celebrities, to receive the most attention. “Good” being subjective, of course—and in this case, partially governed by non-human intelligence. That may be better than influencers.

“We want to make it a point to listen to our users and build something they want,” says Park, who believes Instagram does not exactly excel in customer support. “Mainly because their users aren’t actually their customers, just their inventory.” Early users of the Lensii AI app, he promises, will be involved in the development of the app. “If there’s anything you want to see in the app, or anything you want to be removed, just submit a feedback form from your own profile page within the app, and it will be read by an actual person on the team,” he promises.

When Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp shut down in early October for over five hours, many people found that even if they detested the social media sites, they could no longer conduct business without them. Could the Lensii AI app be the solution?

You’ll have to sign up for the early access list and use the app to find out. When you do, let us know.