It comes as no surprise that the impact of AI — both positive and negative — on the photo and video industries was a running theme throughout Visual 1st this year. (For a comprehensive session-by-session summary, check out Gary Pageau's review in The Dead Pixels Society, see also below.)

Whereas past Visual 1st presentations centered on using AI to generate, edit, or enhance individual photos and videos, this year the emphasis shifted dramatically: leveraging natural-language prompts to make creating visual stories easier, as a way for users to preserve and share their memories.

No format at Visual 1st is better suited to highlighting this trend than our fast-paced 4-minute Show & Tell sessions, where 26 developers showcased their latest innovations. What struck me most was how many presenters have recently enabled users to submit natural-language prompts — written or spoken — to generate visual stories:

• Prompt-based interaction: Written or spoken text is replacing or complementing traditional UI elements like menus and sliders.
• Visual stories: Rather than focusing exclusively on single photos or videos, the focus has shifted to generating multi-format stories — combining images, video, audio, maps, or diary-like text — delivered digitally or in print.

To illustrate this evolution, here is a look at the innovative approaches demoed at Visual 1st across three key categories: photobook story creation, video and audio story creation, and digital storytelling.

1. Photobook Story Creation

Five photobook creation tools — Klikkie, Photo9, Motif Studio (from Mimeo Photos), Printess, and Storytellrs (from MagicLabs) — demoed features using AI prompts to streamline the creation of visual stories by means of printed photobooks:

Voice prompts. Klikkie, Motif Studio, and Photo9 ingest not only written text but also spoken prompts. For instance, Motif Studio demonstrated this prompt, spoken aloud:

"Create a photobook of our anniversary trip to South Africa. Please feature the many great scenic shots, especially on our anniversary day, which was April xx and has some great images. Please also add relevant captions through the book as something my wife and I would have easy said aloud to describe the moment."

Prompts to solicit prompts. To give their storytelling engines better context, Klikkie, Photo9, and Printess also proactively prompt the user. For instance, after being asked to create a vacation book, Klikkie's AI assistant followed up by asking: "What was the best part of your trip for you?"

Automated map generation. Klikkie and Motif Studio showed auto-generated maps embedded directly in the book, highlighting specific trip locations derived from image content and metadata.

Human oversight. Storytellrs combines AI-generated text and imagery with human designer review to ensure quality, safety, and brand consistency for its personalized children's books.

Hybrid editing (prompts + traditional UI). Printess, Motif Studio, and Photo9 supplement initial prompt generation with traditional manual editing tools, letting users fine-tune layouts, swap images, or resize elements after the AI's first pass.

Cross-platform authoring. Photo9 demonstrated how users can initiate photobook creation using natural-language prompts inside ChatGPT and WhatsApp. The AI designs the initial pages, which users can then customize in the Photo9 editor.

2. Video & Audio Story Creation

Short-form video generation. JWX (formerly JW Player, which acquired past Visual 1st presenter Auggie) demoed its Article to Video feature. Starting with a prompt like "Make a video on why to visit San Francisco," the system pulled content from two articles and matching photos. Follow-up prompts like "Voice it for me" selected narrator voices, while "Suggest content for me" automatically added licensed Getty music and photos.

Context-aware audio. Sonilo demonstrated simple prompts that generate synchronized, emotionally aligned soundtracks for existing videos. Its AI automatically detects scene changes, pacing, and emotional cues to pair the video with licensed tracks. Sonilo also builds standalone audio: a prompt in ChatGPT generated lullaby lyrics, which were then fed into Sonilo to produce a fully arranged song matching the lyrics' natural rhythm.

3. Digital Story Creation

Empowering AI agents with visual intelligence. Gumnut's visual intelligence platform allows external AI agents to understand who is in a photo, what is happening, and where, when, and how it was taken — all without giving those agents raw access to user files. For example, a busy parent could ask Meta's Muse app: "Each night, review my recent photos and send the best ones of John and Jane to the family WhatsApp group."

Converting chat messaging history into visual stories. LifeWeaver, winner of this year's Visual 1st Special Recognition Award, showcased its "memory intelligence layer." By drawing on both photos and complete chat histories from messaging apps like WhatsApp, simple prompts can transform massive archives into structured narratives. Their demo prompt — "Create a lifetime biography of my dad" — condensed thousands of WhatsApp messages spanning hundreds of pages into a cohesive 72-page storybook ready for digital sharing or be printed as a photobook.