WWDC this year brought a lot to the influencer and UGC space – and not just with Photos app updates. The MacOS and iOS updates are giving consumers the power to become their own media empires. We’re going to dive into some of the highlights from the keynote that directly affect the UGC market and Instagram influencers, and how to make the most of these new software upgrades.

‍Apple has overhauled its detection and scanning technology. The Photos app is now one of the smartest apps in iOS.  Photos can identify screenshots, receipts, duplicates, and more – filing them and separating from the rest of your library, giving you a clean photostream of original photos to browse.

Influencers and consumers alike all have the same functional problem with their phones – not enough storage. Samsung even touted a solution last year in a series of advertisements, promoting rapid cloud storage for photo libraries. Like professional photographers, it behooves anyone taking a high-quality selfie or photograph to take multiple or use a rapid-shutter program in order to get the best shot possible.

Outside of apps that can remove these, or native touch-based actions, users are condemned to tedious scrolling to sort their photo collections, a frequent time-waster, which also creates the risk of losing the “good shots” into the recesses of stored data.  

The announced software updates to Photos should take a big step towards rectifying this problem, filing away duplicates into well-defined folders and “memories”. This iOS update allows users to pick and edit their best pictures faster, and arguably the iPhone is one of the best tools available for managing a creative portfolio. Brands should take note of these updates as consumers now have the ability to produce extremely high-quality creative, and with the right tools, brands can work to permission these. You’ve likely seen iPhone’s X-line of advertisements touting the photo controls, darkening, and dozens of studio-quality tools and tricks now possible with commercial, public-facing software. With dynamic portrait lighting and high key mono- Apple declared the iPhone the king of selfies. Apple is setting the high bar for an all-in-one UGC machine for everyone from the casual photo submitter to the high-powered Instagram model. Updates to Find my iPhone & Find My Mac (Now branded simply “Find My”) mean that an influencer’s large investments in high-quality tech are secure. Plus, who can argue with a novel method for tracking equipment, even if it’s disconnected from the cell and wifi service. For a great writeup on the details of this tech, check out this article.

‍If you haven’t checked out the keynote yourself, watch it here. If you’ve started collecting and generating your own UGC, learn more about how to turn UGC into advertising gold.