Commoditization of photos and code

The studio

My mom worked as an assistant in a photo studio for almost all of my childhood. It was the halfway point on my walk home from school, so I spent a lot of afternoons there. We took quick takes every holiday. The owners are close family friends (Tor taking my grandparents' anniversary photo).

I was born in 1994, so as a kid I watched that industry go through a lot of change, both technically and in the business model.

Developers have a lot of emotions going on at once about AI right now. Some of it is grief. AI is taking away the feeling of being in flow. Some of it is fear about code becoming a commodity. We could learn a lot from photographers that made it through the 2000s.

At first, digital cameras looked like a win

The first wave of change felt like good news for photographers. Retouching used to mean airbrushing by hand. Now you could do it in Photoshop, save some macros, and get through a shoot much faster. Better tools for the people who already knew what they were doing.

It also helped decrease costs. Film was expensive. Memory cards were too, but you could use them over and over. All of that sounds good right?

Then everyone had a camera

Then digital camera prices kept falling. A pro DSLR cost $5,500 in 1999. Four years later Canon sold one for $899. The average digital camera went from $393 in 2000 to $78 in 2012. Everybody bought one. And if everyone has a camera, why pay a studio?

You can see it in film sales. US consumers bought 786 million rolls in 2000 and about 20 million in 2011, and the drop sped up every year Kodak reported it.

Then everyone wanted the files

After everyone had a camera, social media came along, and everybody wanted the files.

In 2005, 7% of US adults used social networking sites. By 2011 it was half of them, and by early 2012 they were uploading 250 million photos a day to Facebook alone.

Sources: Pew, social networking usage 2005 to 2015 · History of Facebook · Instagram · Facebook IPO filing, 250M photos a day (PetaPixel)

My millennial is showing, but I remember people posting Facebook photo albums for everything. But you need the files on your computer to do that, and studios didn't want you to have them.

Studios made their money on prints.

After a shoot, you looked through all the photos that were taken and picked the ones you wanted printed. The studio kept the files.

Say you bought a print and hung it up. Your mother-in-law comes over and says, that print is beautiful, I'd like one. You go back to the photographer for another print.

Then there were frames. Not everyone bought one, but the studio could sell you a frame right there. More dollars flowing through the studio from the same shoot.

Take one photo, print it many times, sell the same photo over and over. It was a great revenue source, and somewhat recurring.

But customers wanted the files to post. If a studio handed them over, how would it know you wouldn't go print them yourself? And if it refused, how do I post? Often people would scan the printed photos and upload them anyway, even though they didn't own the rights to the photos.

The photo itself was getting commoditized, and the industry was trying to hold on to the pricing power and pricing structure it had before.

The cope

People fought the change saying things like:

• Film will be here forever
• The average person won't become a very good photographer
• Yes, more people can take photos now, but they don't look as good

This is all not true if you open Instagram.

Some of this is anger. It causes a ton of motivated reasoning, where otherwise logical people end up resorting to ad hominem attacks. We tell ourselves we're being rational, but really we're emotional about feeling rational, which is a different thing.

It is dangerous to fight the consumer and fight technology waves. Sometimes even fatal cc: Kodak.

Positioning + pricing

If everybody has a camera, your value isn't "I can take photos of you." You're selling an experience, quality, taste. Studios were selling those things before, but they didn't position them. If someone wanted holiday photos, they had a professional take them.

Eventually the studio my mom worked at switched its pricing: a higher base package price, with your digital files included. To start, the package came with a set number of files. If you wanted all of the files from the shoot, you could have those too if you paid extra.

The parallel to code

I see the same cope in software right now. The photographer said no one would ever take a high-quality photo on a phone. Phones now have so much ML processing that you can take a pretty good photo without knowing how to change a single setting.

Building software is going the same way. AI still gets levels of abstraction wrong. It is still not as good a programmer as you are. That does not change the market dynamics. Most code is getting commoditized.

A non-programmer with Claude and Codex still only produces "okay" applications. But a great engineer with AI can ship in a week what would take a team a month just a few years ago. Just like with photography, the best photographers that leaned into the tech pushed the field forward.

But does this mean fewer jobs?

Yes, fewer studio jobs, but there are more photographers now than ever. Jobs at portrait studios peaked at about 81,000 in 2007. By 2025 there were about 53,000, a third fewer.

But photography as a job did not shrink. The BLS counted about 129,000 photographers in 2004 and about 145,000 in 2025. What changed is who they work for. In 2004, "more than half" were self-employed. In 2025 it was 67%. The work moved from studios to people working for themselves.

Pay held roughly flat. The median salaried photographer earned $26,080 in 2004, which is around $44,000 in 2025 dollars. In 2025 the median was $44,660.

There will be more developer jobs in the future than there are now, they just might be at smaller firms (working for yourself, like 67% of photographers today).

Sources: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, photographers · 2006-07 edition figures (via Edinformatics) · 2016-17 edition figures (via CareerTrend) · Portrait studio employment, BLS via FRED

You are not a commodity

When your art form is being commoditized, that does not mean you are. The medium is. You are not a commodity as long as you adapt.