I thought editing those old photos would only take an hour

Getting stuck in the weeds of background removal

I recently spent an entire Sunday afternoon trying to salvage some photos from a family trip we took a couple of years ago. I kept seeing these ads for AI-based tools that promise to magically remove backgrounds or fix the lighting, and I figured, why not? It seemed like a simple enough task. I logged onto one of those free sites, I think it was called photoshoppluggedin or something similar, expecting to breeze through about fifty files. The reality was that I spent forty minutes just trying to get the software to recognize the edge of a jacket against a gray wall. My computer kept freezing, and for some reason, every time I tried to export the file, the quality dropped so significantly it looked like it had been taken on a flip phone from 2005.

The endless cycle of downloading and deleting

I ended up cycling through three different free image compressors because the files were too large to upload to the hosting site I use for family albums. It is funny how these sites offer ‘unlimited’ features until you actually try to process more than two images in a row. One site demanded I sign up for a trial that cost around $15 a month just to get the ‘high-quality’ download button to work. I refused. I don’t need a subscription; I just wanted to crop out the stranger standing behind my son at the aquarium. I ended up just doing a hack job in the standard preview app on my Mac, which took three times as long but at least didn’t cost me any money or personal data.

Why simple things feel so complicated now

It is strange to think that even with all the talk about ‘AI-integrated’ features coming to our phones—like that big Apple update everyone keeps discussing where Siri is supposed to handle our photo edits—the actual day-to-day experience of cleaning up a folder of personal photos remains clunky. I read somewhere that these upcoming systems will handle ‘spatial reframing’ and all sorts of complex tasks natively. Maybe that will fix it. But for now, I’m left with half-edited folders and the annoyance of knowing I wasted hours when I could have just left the stranger in the background of the shot. It feels like we are constantly waiting for the ‘easy’ version of these tools to actually arrive, while the current options just add an extra layer of digital admin to our weekends.

Missing the mark with free tools

I remember back when I tried to design a small menu for my sister’s neighborhood gathering. I looked for a free program to help with the layout, thinking it would be as simple as dragging and dropping elements. I ended up fighting with a text box that wouldn’t center properly for forty-five minutes. You would think that by now, software designers would realize that sometimes we just want to move one pixel, not rewrite the entire architecture of a file. I’m still not sure if I’m just bad at using these tools or if the tools themselves are designed to be intentionally frustrating so you’ll eventually click the upgrade button. Either way, my photos are still sitting in a folder on my desktop, slightly blurry and still mostly unedited.