AI is certainly one of 2025’s buzzwords, but how much time can photographers save using automated culling and editing? According to software company Aftershoot, about 89 million hours.
The data comes from Aftershoot’s annual look at aggregated, anonymized user data, a report dubbed Snapshot 2025. The company says the data indicates photographers are facing record workloads, but automation is helping keep up.
Across 188,000 photographers, Aftershoot’s active users saved an estimated 89 million hours through culling and editing automation. That comes out to 473 hours for each photographer, which is just under a dozen 40-hour workweeks.
Aftershoot says that users processed 8.8 billion images in 2025. AI-automated culling, or the process of selecting the best shot and weeding out the duplicates and misses, looked at 6.8 billion images and recognized around 1.24 billion duplicates.
The company estimates that the time saved is about $212 million in savings on lost time – and around 17.8M kWhs.
“As photographers take on bigger workloads and shorter deadlines, AI has shifted from a nice-to-have to an essential part of running a sustainable creative business,” Harshit Dwivedi, Founder of Aftershoot, said. “Saving 89 million hours in a single year isn’t just a number – it represents time creators reclaimed for creativity, clients, and life beyond the screen.”
In 2025, Aftershoot added beta retrouching tools to the software. The company says that it has saved around 401 hours per photographer on average, with the most-used tools being those for acne, blemishes, face smoothing, stray hair removal, and teeth whitening.
Another new 2025 feature? Instant AI profiles, which take a photographer’s favorite Lightroom presets and apply them dynamically, creating consistency across images shot with different exposures, white balance, and other settings.
In the 2024 numbers, Aftershoot tallied 5.4 billion images, showing a significant jump to 8.8 billion images in 2025.
As part of the study, Aftershoot has an introductory offer for new users that discounts the first six months of Aftershoot Pro to $99 (about £75 / AU$150 / CA$137).
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