The Dead Pixels Society Podcast

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Your computer is packed with stories you cannot find. Video clips named DJI003, endless B-roll, meeting recordings, marketing footage, client projects, school photography archives, and personal travel memories all pile up until searching feels impossible. Gary Pageau of The Dead Pixels Society sits down with Henry Kang, founder and CEO of Clipto.AI, to talk about a different approach: Local-first AI that indexes and understands your media on your own machine, so you can search your library in plain English without uploading terabytes to the cloud.

He digs into the real advantages of on-device AI for content creators and businesses, including faster workflows, no upload waiting, fewer cloud token costs, and a much cleaner privacy posture for sensitive work under NDA. Dr. Kang explains why video search is still one of the hardest problems in media asset management, and how Clipto bridges the gap between how humans remember visuals and how file systems store them. Instead of hunting through folders, you describe what you want and refine as you go.

Then learned what surprised Dr. Kang and his team: Users far beyond filmmakers and photographers, plus a new MCP connection that lets AI agents interact with your local “memory” while keeping data local. That unlocks a creative twist, asking not only “where is the clip I need?” but also “what can I make with what I already have?”

The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is powered by ScanMyPhotos, serving the photo industry for more than 30 years.

ScanMyPhotos
ScanMyPhotos provides professional digitization services for photos, negatives, slides, and more

Energize your sales with Shareme.chat, the proven texting platform. 

ShareMe.Chat 
ShareMe.Chat platform uses chat-to-text on your website to keep your customers connected and buying!

Mediaclip
Mediaclip strives to continuously enhance the user experience while dramatically increasing revenue.

Independent Photo Imagers
IPI is a member + trade association and a cooperative buying group in the photo + print industry.

Photo Imaging CONNECT
The Photo Imaging CONNECT conference, March 2027, at the RIO Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas, N

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Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

Sign up for the Dead Pixels Society newsletter at http://bit.ly/DeadPixelsSignUp.

Contact us at [email protected]

Visit our LinkedIn group, Photo/Digital Imaging Network, and Facebook group,  The Dead Pixels Society.

Leave a review on Apple and Podchaser.

Are you interested in being a guest? Click here for details.

Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning

Have an idea or tip? Send us a text!

Most businesses fail to grow for a simple reason: The owner is stuck selling the obvious thing, while the customer is buying something deeper. When Kenneth Kollasch tells us what it’s like to grow up inside a multi-generational ballroom and Latin dance studio, the lesson lands fast. Dance lessons were never just about steps. They were about confidence, relationships, identity, and feeling at home in a room full of people. That “hidden product” idea maps directly to the photo imaging world too, where prints and gear are really about memories and self expression.

From there, we get practical about small business systems and exit planning. Kollasch works with franchise owners and stressed “mom and pop” operators who feel trapped in a daily cycle of fires. Kollasch and Gary Pageau of The Dead Pixels Society talk through how to move from swamp mode to a predictable operating system: start with a deep diagnostic of real numbers, then document the know how that’s been living in your head for years. A clear playbook and solid SOPs don’t just help you hire and train, they make your business less owner dependent and more valuable when you want to sell.

Kollasch also reveals what buyers should look for during due diligence and business acquisition, including the team you’re actually buying, how automated and repeatable the operations are, what the financial output really means, and why the seller is exiting.

The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is powered by ScanMyPhotos, serving the photo industry for more than 30 years.

ScanMyPhotos
ScanMyPhotos provides professional digitization services for photos, negatives, slides, and more

Energize your sales with Shareme.chat, the proven texting platform. 

ShareMe.Chat 
ShareMe.Chat platform uses chat-to-text on your website to keep your customers connected and buying!

Mediaclip
Mediaclip strives to continuously enhance the user experience while dramatically increasing revenue.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Independent Photo Imagers
IPI is a member + trade association and a cooperative buying group in the photo + print industry.

Photo Imaging CONNECT
The Photo Imaging CONNECT conference, March 2027, at the RIO Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas, N

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

Sign up for the Dead Pixels Society newsletter at http://bit.ly/DeadPixelsSignUp.

Contact us at [email protected]

Visit our LinkedIn group, Photo/Digital Imaging Network, and Facebook group,  The Dead Pixels Society.

Leave a review on Apple and Podchaser.

Are you interested in being a guest? Click here for details.

Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning

Have an idea or tip? Send us a text!

Your customer doesn’t order a “file” they order a memory, and nothing kills that moment faster than a print that looks worse than the phone screen. We sit down with Servi Pieters, CEO of Viesus, to unpack why modern photo printing faces new traps: HDR smartphone displays, print workflows, heavy social media compression, and low-light computational photography that looks fine on glass but falls apart on paper.

Pieters gets specific about what an automatic image enhancement layer actually does inside high-volume labs and print providers. Pieters shares a real-world KPI wake-up call: One company saw complaint rates jump when Viesus was inadvertently disabled, then drop by 58% when it was turned back on. He also talks about the hidden conversion problem with resolution and DPI warnings, and how reliable upscaling and artifact removal can keep shoppers from abandoning an order while still keeping the photo authentic.

From skin tone handling and scene-aware correction to tuning for different substrates like paper, metal, canvas, and textiles, this is a practical conversation for anyone building a photo lab workflow, a personalization program, or a print-on-demand business. Pieters also discusses new PDF features, including how Viesus can extract images, enhance them, and place them back without disturbing the rest of the file.

The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is powered by ScanMyPhotos, serving the photo industry for more than 30 years.

ScanMyPhotos
ScanMyPhotos provides professional digitization services for photos, negatives, slides, and more

Energize your sales with Shareme.chat, the proven texting platform. 

ShareMe.Chat 
ShareMe.Chat platform uses chat-to-text on your website to keep your customers connected and buying!

Mediaclip
Mediaclip strives to continuously enhance the user experience while dramatically increasing revenue.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Photo Imaging CONNECT
The Photo Imaging CONNECT conference, March 2027, at the RIO Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas, N

Independent Photo Imagers
IPI is a member + trade association and a cooperative buying group in the photo + print industry.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

Sign up for the Dead Pixels Society newsletter at http://bit.ly/DeadPixelsSignUp.

Contact us at [email protected]

Visit our LinkedIn group, Photo/Digital Imaging Network, and Facebook group,  The Dead Pixels Society.

Leave a review on Apple and Podchaser.

Are you interested in being a guest? Click here for details.

Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning

Have an idea or tip? Send us a text!

Kodak didn’t “miss digital.” What really happened is more interesting and a lot more useful if you work in photo printing, photo labs, or photo software. Gary Pageau of The Dead Pixels Society sits down with longtime marketing leader Rocky Bowles to trace the real arc from the film era to early online ordering, and then into the current moment where AI content, social commerce, and collapsing attention spans are rewriting how people buy photo products.

Bowles shares what it took to earn consumer trust when the idea of mailing your film to a lab felt risky, and how ProShots tried to connect photographers, labs, and customers online before Facebook normalized sharing. From there, we unpack why startup innovation can die inside corporate structures, even when the technology is strong, and why the “legacy business” problem is different from having no vision at all.

Then Bowles gets practical: what marketing actually means in 2026 for the photo imaging industry. She talks audience segmentation, content budgets, and the uncomfortable truth that real campaigns need time, often 90 days, before you can judge results. She also digs into direct-to-consumer strategy, “orphan brides,” and why reducing friction matters more than perfect product pages, especially on mobile and platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is powered by ScanMyPhotos, serving the photo industry for more than 30 years.

ScanMyPhotos
ScanMyPhotos provides professional digitization services for photos, negatives, slides, and more

Energize your sales with Shareme.chat, the proven texting platform. 

ShareMe.Chat 
ShareMe.Chat platform uses chat-to-text on your website to keep your customers connected and buying!

Mediaclip
Mediaclip strives to continuously enhance the user experience while dramatically increasing revenue.

Independent Photo Imagers
IPI is a member + trade association and a cooperative buying group in the photo + print industry.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

Sign up for the Dead Pixels Society newsletter at http://bit.ly/DeadPixelsSignUp.

Contact us at [email protected]

Visit our LinkedIn group, Photo/Digital Imaging Network, and Facebook group,  The Dead Pixels Society.

Leave a review on Apple and Podchaser.

Are you interested in being a guest? Click here for details.

Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning

Have an idea or tip? Send us a text!

You can ask a frontier model for marketing copy and get something polished, fast, and strangely not you. That gap between “correct” and “authentic” is where this conversation with Dr. Arshavir Blackwell gets practical. Dr. Blackwell tells The Dead Pixels Society why large language models (LLMs) still behave like black boxes, why hallucinations happen, and what mechanistic interpretability is doing to help us understand what is actually happening inside billions of learned parameters.

We also break down the core mechanics of modern AI in plain language: words become numbers, those numbers move through stacked layers, and the model predicts the next word again and again until you see a full response. Dr. Blackwell explains why the transformer architecture, popularized by the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” became the watershed moment that made today’s AI assistants and generative AI feel suddenly powerful and broadly useful.

Then the discussion shifts to “roll your own AI” with local large language models that run on your own computer. Local, on-device AI can improve privacy and data security, reduce token-based costs, and open the door to tuning a model on your writing so the output matches your true brand voice. For small business marketing, that means faster iteration across channels, more A-B style variations, and better ideas without spending hours rewriting generic text. If you care about authenticity, compliance, or simply keeping control of your workflow, this one will give you a clear starting point.

The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is powered by ScanMyPhotos, serving the photo industry for more than 30 years.

ScanMyPhotos
ScanMyPhotos provides professional digitization services for photos, negatives, slides, and more

Energize your sales with Shareme.chat, the proven texting platform. 

ShareMe.Chat 
ShareMe.Chat platform uses chat-to-text on your website to keep your customers connected and buying!

Mediaclip
Mediaclip strives to continuously enhance the user experience while dramatically increasing revenue.

Photo Imaging CONNECT
The Photo Imaging CONNECT conference, March 2027, at the RIO Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas, N

Independent Photo Imagers
IPI is a member + trade association and a cooperative buying group in the photo + print industry.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

Sign up for the Dead Pixels Society newsletter at http://bit.ly/DeadPixelsSignUp.

Contact us at [email protected]

Visit our LinkedIn group, Photo/Digital Imaging Network, and Facebook group,  The Dead Pixels Society.

Leave a review on Apple and Podchaser.

Are you interested in being a guest? Click here for details.

Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning

Have an idea or tip? Send us a text!

AI can generate a believable image in seconds, so why does real photography still matter, and how do working photographers protect what they create? We’re joined by Angela Kurkian, CEO of Professional Photographers of America (PPA), to talk about the parts of the job that don’t show up in a highlight reel: Building a sustainable photography business, finding community, and defending your rights as a creator.

Kurkian and Gary Pageau of The Dead Pixels Society dig into what makes PPA different as one of the oldest nonprofit photography associations, including the mission to support photographers as small business owners and the idea of serving both the creative artist and the business warrior. She shares her own path through the industry, what she learned in a high-volume studio, and why so many photographers struggle when pricing becomes a guessing game. Kurkian also get practical about tools and benchmarks that help you plan revenue, cost of sales, expenses, and owner pay so a photographer's rates match the life they desire.

Kurkian also talks about industry pressure points, like AI in photography and copyright. She explains why PPA’s advocacy in Washington, DC focuses on intellectual property, what photographers misunderstand about copyright registration, and why AI-generated headshots and images raise real ownership and enforcement questions. We also cover where to get vetted education and community support through PPA, including Photovision and local networks.

The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is powered by ScanMyPhotos, serving the photo industry for more than 30 years.

ScanMyPhotos
ScanMyPhotos provides professional digitization services for photos, negatives, slides, and more

Energize your sales with Shareme.chat, the proven texting platform. 

ShareMe.Chat 
ShareMe.Chat platform uses chat-to-text on your website to keep your customers connected and buying!

Mediaclip
Mediaclip strives to continuously enhance the user experience while dramatically increasing revenue.

Independent Photo Imagers
IPI is a member + trade association and a cooperative buying group in the photo + print industry.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Photo Imaging CONNECT
The Photo Imaging CONNECT conference, March 2027, at the RIO Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas, N

ScanMyPhotos
ScanMyPhotos provides professional digitization services for photos, negatives, slides, and more

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

Sign up for the Dead Pixels Society newsletter at http://bit.ly/DeadPixelsSignUp.

Contact us at [email protected]

Visit our LinkedIn group, Photo/Digital Imaging Network, and Facebook group,  The Dead Pixels Society.

Leave a review on Apple and Podchaser.

Are you interested in being a guest? Click here for details.

Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning

Have an idea or tip? Send us a text!

Your business can be brilliant and still get wiped out by timing, regulation, or a technology shift you saw coming but didn’t act on. Gary Pageau of The Dead Pixels Society sits down with six-time Silicon Valley CEO and author Mike Grossman to talk about the unglamorous reality of entrepreneurship: the wins that arrive late, the pivots that need full commitment, and the failures that happen even when the team does a lot right.

Grossman walks us through early experiences in the tech world, including consulting for Apple in the mid-1980s, then into fintech startups that ran into two classic hazards: adverse selection and legislation that changed the economics overnight. From there, we get tactical about startup survival, including how to read leading indicators like lead quality, pipeline shifts, and revenue direction, plus the mindset shift that saves companies: the business model is not the business. If you cannot adapt, you are not stubborn, you are exposed.

We also zoom out to Silicon Valley culture and today’s AI wave. Grossman explains why failure can be a useful teacher without turning it into a personal brand performance, and we pressure-test AI adoption with a memorable example of hallucinated outputs that look perfect but are totally wrong. The thread running through everything is leadership and people: strong teams, clear focus, and steady decision-making still matter, even in an AI-driven economy where jobs and workflows keep changing.

The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is powered by ScanMyPhotos, serving the photo industry for more than 30 years.

ScanMyPhotos
ScanMyPhotos provides professional digitization services for photos, negatives, slides, and more

Energize your sales with Shareme.chat, the proven texting platform. 

ShareMe.Chat 
ShareMe.Chat platform uses chat-to-text on your website to keep your customers connected and buying!

Mediaclip
Mediaclip strives to continuously enhance the user experience while dramatically increasing revenue.

Visual 1st
Visual 1st is the premier global conference focused on the photo and video ecosystem.

Independent Photo Imagers
IPI is a member + trade association and a cooperative buying group in the photo + print industry.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Photo Imaging CONNECT
The Photo Imaging CONNECT conference, March 2027, at the RIO Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas, N

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

Sign up for the Dead Pixels Society newsletter at http://bit.ly/DeadPixelsSignUp.

Contact us at [email protected]

Visit our LinkedIn group, Photo/Digital Imaging Network, and Facebook group,  The Dead Pixels Society.

Leave a review on Apple and Podchaser.

Are you interested in being a guest? Click here for details.

Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning

Have an idea or tip? Send us a text!

One screenshot can feel harmless, until you realize it might be happening at scale and quietly rewriting your sales numbers. Gary Pageau of The Dead Pixels Society sits down with Carl Bott, founder of SnapShield, to get practical about a problem volume photographers keep bumping into: parents screenshotting online proofs, using AI watermark removal tools, and sharing “good enough” images instead of buying digital downloads or prints. Bott shares what he’s seeing across school photography and youth sports photography, including why the old solution of bigger watermarks can backfire by hurting the buyer experience and lowering conversion.

Bott shares how he developed SnapShield and how it works. He shows how screenshot attempts can be reported with timestamps and access codes, and how that data changes decision-making for a volume business built on revenue per head. When you can spot patterns, you can separate normal price sensitivity from real theft behavior, decide which schools or leagues are worth revisiting, and understand why some “non-buyers” suddenly start purchasing when screenshots stop working. They also talk about the gray areas, like families who screenshot to show relatives, and how a clear, customizable consent box can educate customers on copyright without turning your gallery into a hostile checkout.

Mobile is a huge part of the story. Most browsing and many purchases happen on phones, and that convenience comes with new limits on what web galleries can control. Bott breaks down the tradeoffs between web-based protection and downloadable apps, why parents resist app installs for once-a-year ordering, and why platform integrations (including GotPhoto and more in the works) are key to making protection feel seamless.

The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is powered by ScanMyPhotos, serving the photo industry for more than 30 years.

ScanMyPhotos
ScanMyPhotos provides professional digitization services for photos, negatives, slides, and more

Energize your sales with Shareme.chat, the proven texting platform. 

ShareMe.Chat 
ShareMe.Chat platform uses chat-to-text on your website to keep your customers connected and buying!

Mediaclip
Mediaclip strives to continuously enhance the user experience while dramatically increasing revenue.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Independent Photo Imagers
IPI is a member + trade association and a cooperative buying group in the photo + print industry.

Photo Imaging CONNECT
The Photo Imaging CONNECT conference, March 2027, at the RIO Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas, N

Visual 1st
Visual 1st is the premier global conference focused on the photo and video ecosystem.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

Sign up for the Dead Pixels Society newsletter at http://bit.ly/DeadPixelsSignUp.

Contact us at [email protected]

Visit our LinkedIn group, Photo/Digital Imaging Network, and Facebook group,  The Dead Pixels Society.

Leave a review on Apple and Podchaser.

Are you interested in being a guest? Click here for details.

Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning

Have an idea or tip? Send us a text!

Your camera roll isn’t a memory system, it’s a backlog, and the bigger it gets, the harder it is to turn real moments into something you can actually revisit. Gary Pageau of The Dead Pixels Society sits down with Mixbook CEO and co-founder Andrew Laffoon as Mixbook hits its 20th anniversary. We dig into a question that matters to anyone who cares about photography, printing, or preserving family history: What makes a photo book feel like a story?

Laffoon gets specific about the real friction points that stop people from finishing photo books. Years ago, the problem was missing the right shots. Now it’s the opposite: thousands of images, multiple shooters, and no clear starting point. He walks us through Mixbook’s new Story Mode, an AI photo book workflow that starts with a prompt, interviews the customer to capture intent and tone, then proposes structure, selects scenes, lays out spreads, and writes narrative text that’s meant to sound like your voice. We also talk craftsmanship, why “the last five percent” is most of the work, and why AI has to feel helpful rather than generic, creepy, or oddly robotic.

Laffoon also discusses the market, too: who the “chief memory officer” is, why younger generations are printing more than you might think, and why the industry still struggles with awareness compared to TikTok and short-form video.

The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is powered by ScanMyPhotos, serving the photo industry for more than 30 years.

ScanMyPhotos
ScanMyPhotos provides professional digitization services for photos, negatives, slides, and more

Energize your sales with Shareme.chat, the proven texting platform. 

ShareMe.Chat 
ShareMe.Chat platform uses chat-to-text on your website to keep your customers connected and buying!

Mediaclip
Mediaclip strives to continuously enhance the user experience while dramatically increasing revenue.

Independent Photo Imagers
IPI is a member + trade association and a cooperative buying group in the photo + print industry.

Photo Imaging CONNECT
The Photo Imaging CONNECT conference, March 2027, at the RIO Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas, N

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

Sign up for the Dead Pixels Society newsletter at http://bit.ly/DeadPixelsSignUp.

Contact us at [email protected]

Visit our LinkedIn group, Photo/Digital Imaging Network, and Facebook group,  The Dead Pixels Society.

Leave a review on Apple and Podchaser.

Are you interested in being a guest? Click here for details.

Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning

Have an idea or tip? Send us a text!

Your camera roll is overflowing, your group chats are chaos, and the biggest platforms keep getting weirder about data, ads, and AI. So what would a modern photo sharing app look like if it started with privacy and still felt genuinely social? Gary Pageau from The Dead Pixels Society sits down with Darin Myman, CEO of Myseum.ai, to unpack Picture Party, a new approach to event photo sharing that’s closer to a private social network than a simple shared album.

Myman discusses the real differences: A feed where people can post big batches of photos and videos, add context with captions and tags, and react and comment like the early days of social networking. He explains why Picture Party is built so new members can see everything from the beginning, making it useful not only for weddings and parties, but also for long-term family photo archives that can last for decades and be shared across generations.

Privacy is the center of the conversation. Myman talks about the concern that personal images get used for AI training on major platforms, and he outlines a privacy first AI direction that aims to deliver features like automatic tagging and auto album creation without exposing your data or letting it feed giant external models. Also covered are the practical controls that matter in the real world: who can invite others, who can download full size images for printing, view only modes, and moderator tools that can remove content, boot users, or approve posts before they go live. 

The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is powered by ScanMyPhotos, serving the photo industry for more than 30 years.

ScanMyPhotos
ScanMyPhotos provides professional digitization services for photos, negatives, slides, and more

Energize your sales with Shareme.chat, the proven texting platform. 

ShareMe.Chat 
ShareMe.Chat platform uses chat-to-text on your website to keep your customers connected and buying!

Mediaclip
Mediaclip strives to continuously enhance the user experience while dramatically increasing revenue.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Independent Photo Imagers
IPI is a member + trade association and a cooperative buying group in the photo + print industry.

Photo Imaging CONNECT
The Photo Imaging CONNECT conference, March 2027, at the RIO Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas, N

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

Sign up for the Dead Pixels Society newsletter at http://bit.ly/DeadPixelsSignUp.

Contact us at [email protected]

Visit our LinkedIn group, Photo/Digital Imaging Network, and Facebook group,  The Dead Pixels Society.

Leave a review on Apple and Podchaser.

Are you interested in being a guest? Click here for details.

Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning