As Ryan Jacobs started his career in event management and production companies, he kept coming back to the same realization.
"I knew what it was like from an event organizer perspective and how people use photos," Jacobs said. "And what we kept seeing was mainly, photos depreciate over time; there's a time value to photos."
With the rise of smartphones and instant gratification being a necessity with products, the timeliness to send photos is more important than ever. And in most cases, photos taken at conferences, events or other gatherings still take weeks to get to the right people — essentially making sharing the photos a moot point.
"What we're looking to do is put the value of use of photos right away," said Jacobs, the founder of SpotMyPhotos. "Sometimes people refer to what we do as share professional images, on professional cameras, at the speed of a smartphone."
SpotMyPhotos uses AI, facial recognition and pattern recognition to deliver personal event photos to anyone who opts-in — all within roughly 5 seconds. Attendees can enter their phone number into the SpotMyPhoto application, which then securely sends a gallery of all the photos that person is in.
Jacobs launched the company to address the speed at which photos are sent, but also the privacy. While some photographers may mass upload to a social media site, simply telling people to "tag yourselves," Jacobs realizes some event attendees may not want their faces plastered on the internet.
"I remember when people's interactions with the camera changed," Jacobs said. "As soon as Facebook came out, someone would take a photo then ask if it would be posted somewhere. They weren't used to it being shared so widely; we lost the intimacy we had with the camera."
The one-two punch offering has caught the attention of photography giant Canon. The company first came across SpotMyPhotos at the 2019 CES conference and soon began a collaboration. Every recently-manufactured Canon camera now has an integration that allows the SpotMyPhotos technology to be used to stream photos. For non-Canon users, SpotMyPhotos offers a Wi-Fi SD card allowing a similar capability.
"Our mission and our tagline is, 'Let your photos find you,'" Jacobs said. "And we've built every aspect with that in mind, whether it's a camera in real-time or photos they're uploading from elsewhere."
Jacobs, who moved from Chicago to Tampa in 2018, is the founder of SpotMyPhotos. He has a "small team" of an undisclosed amount of employees. The company is a member of Tampa-based innovation hub Embarc Collective and privately raised roughly $1 million while generating revenue.
"'Getting spotted' has become a term now and is synonymous with private photo delivery," Jacobs said. "So it's definitely been meaningful."
