The UX Team conducted a user research project to gain insights on how and why people share, curate, and access photos and videos. Twelve (12) participants were recruited and interviewed remotely.

Key findings suggest that participants use a variety of platforms to manage and share their photo and video files. These include cloud-based storage apps, social media, text-based messaging, e-mail, and local photo app in the phone.

Primary reasons for sharing photos and videos with family and friends include life updates/milestones, fun/pleasure, memories, and sending photo/video files to people who are also captured within the same image/video as the sender.

Major pain points among participants include difficulty in organizing so many photo/video files, lack of storage space, not having desired editing features, and decrease in the quality of the images and videos when shared with others.

We recommend building a centralized application where users can store and access photos and videos with the same quality and capture information (date, location) as the original files in their cloud account, as well as share these files to others through URL links so they can download copies of the original files. Moreover, this application will allow users to tag photos/videos using keywords; have facial/content and duplicate copies recognition ability; and have an automated album creation workflow for photo/video files based on geolocation and date/time capture. Additionally, this product will have built-in editing features