AI Is Getting Smarter. Printed Photos Are Disappearing.
AI can search thousands of pictures on your phone, but decades of family photographs may still be missing. With CES 2027 approaching, it’s time to ask what technology is overlooking.
By Mitch Goldstone, CEO and Co-Founder of ScanMyPhotos.com
Try something. Open your favorite AI photo app and ask it to find a picture of your childhood bedroom. It might find your hotel room from last summer, the inside of your new car, or the dinner you photographed on Tuesday. But that picture of your childhood bedroom? The one your parents took decades ago? It could still be sitting in a box somewhere, completely invisible to the technology.
I’ve worked with family photographs since 1990, and this is something that’s been bothering me about the excitement surrounding AI. We’re developing remarkable tools that can search thousands of pictures in seconds, yet entire decades of our personal histories aren’t even available for them to search. Think about your parents’ wedding, your first bicycle, the house you grew up in, or your grandparents when they were your age. Those photographs probably exist somewhere. But if they’re still prints, slides, or negatives, they’re missing from the digital photo collections we increasingly depend on.
I wonder how much attention the technology industry is paying to all those missing years.
Your family’s history deserves to be seen. Start digitizing your photos at ScanMyPhotos.com
Why Can’t AI Find Old Family Photos?
We’re about to hear another round of announcements about how AI will make our lives easier. Smarter devices, better searches, new ways to organize everything we’ve photographed. Some of these tools are extraordinary. Depending on the service, you can search digital photo libraries using everyday language. You don’t always need to remember a date or filename. Just describe what you’re looking for.
But consider how surprising this can be: your phone might find a picture of the sandwich you ate three days ago, yet not know what your mother looked like on her wedding day. The technology isn’t necessarily doing anything wrong—it can’t search photos it can’t access. Can AI find old family photos? Yes, once they’ve been digitized and added to a compatible photo service. Even then, search results depend on image quality and what the software can recognize. If you grew up before digital cameras became common, years of birthdays, vacations, weddings, school pictures, and everyday afternoons may be missing from your searchable photo collection. And those ordinary moments are often the very ones people most hope to find again years later.
Finding the Photograph Is Only Half the Problem
Imagine finding a picture of your grandmother standing beside a woman you’ve never seen before. AI might recognize their clothing, suggest when the photograph was taken, or identify a building in the background. It might even find other pictures of the same woman. But who was she? Your grandmother’s sister? Her closest friend? Someone she worked with?
AI might offer an answer that sounds perfectly reasonable. That doesn’t mean it’s true, and this is what concerns me most. If software gets a building name wrong, somebody can usually correct it. But when it invents a story about a relative who died 40 years ago, who is going to catch the mistake? Imagine that incorrect information getting copied into a family album, shared with relatives, then repeated years later as something everyone believes happened.
A photograph can reveal what someone looked like. However, it cannot always convey who they were, what they were thinking, or why that moment mattered. At times, the only person who knows is seated across from you at Thanksgiving dinner.
Before You Ask AI, Ask Your Family
With the holidays approaching, here’s something worth doing. Bring a few old photographs to your next family gathering. Choose pictures you’ve wondered about, especially ones with people you don’t recognize. Ask your parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles who’s in them. Find out where they were taken and what was happening that day. Keep asking questions. One photograph can bring back memories nobody has talked about in years.
Check the backs, too. I’ve spent 36 years working with family pictures, and those handwritten names, dates, and little messages can be just as important as what’s on the front. If your relatives agree, record the conversation on your phone. It doesn’t need to be a formal interview. Let them tell you what they remember.
Afterward, digitize the photographs, including any writing on the back. Save the names, dates, and stories alongside the images. Keep copies in more than one safe place. If nobody remembers something, leave it unknown. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing who someone was. There is something wrong with letting a computer invent an answer that eventually becomes part of your family’s history.
What Happens When AI Gets Your Family History Wrong?
Another question is worth asking before uploading old photographs to an AI service. What happens to those pictures after you upload them? Different companies have different policies about storing images, using them to improve their systems, sharing information, and deleting files. Before uploading private family photographs, find out what the service actually does with them. If you’re using AI to restore an old picture, always keep the original scan. An enhanced photograph can look wonderful, but AI can sometimes change faces, clothing, backgrounds, or other details. Without the original, you may eventually forget what was actually there.
At ScanMyPhotos, we’ve helped people digitize photographs, slides and negatives since 1990. I’ve watched scanning technology change enormously during that time. What hasn’t changed is how much information can disappear when nobody remembers the people or places in a photograph. No scanner can recover a story that was never recorded.
What I’d Like to See at CES 2027
I expect CES will be filled with impressive demonstrations of what AI can do next, but I’d like to see technology companies spend more time helping people reconnect with what came before. Make it easier to bring printed photographs into digital collections. Help families organize the pictures they already have. Give people better ways to attach verified names, dates, handwritten notes, and recorded memories. Most importantly, make it clear when AI knows something and when it’s guessing.
We don’t need software inventing family histories because it can’t find the real ones. Your phone probably has thousands of photographs from the past few years. Somewhere in your family, there may be a picture of you at five years old that you’ve completely forgotten. Someone might still remember exactly where it was taken, who was standing beside you, and what happened that day.
Ask them while you can.
Revised on November 6, 2026
