I have been photographing people in Paris for ten years. And for probably eight of those ten years, I spent way too much of my time doing things that had nothing to do with photography. Writing blog posts that sat unfinished for weeks. Trying to come up with Pinterest descriptions at 11pm. Staring at my Instagram drafts wondering why none of them felt right. Googling “how to write a meta description” for the fourth time.

The actual photography part, the part I love, kept getting squeezed out by all the business stuff around it.

AI didn’t fix all of that overnight. But it has made a real dent. And because I find this topic genuinely interesting, and because I think a lot of photographers are in the same position I was in, I wanted to share what I’ve learned.

This is the first post in a series called AI for Photographers: What I’m Actually Using. Each post covers one specific way I use AI in my photography business, from generating blog post ideas to building a custom app that acts as my marketing control center. Real workflows, real results, and I’ll tell you when something is still a work in progress.

One thing I want to say upfront: I am not an AI expert. I don’t have a tech background. I have eighteen years in marketing and ten years behind a camera, and I am just someone who got curious, started experimenting, and found some things that genuinely save me time. If I can do this, you can absolutely do this.

Why Running a Photography Business Needs a Different Kind of Help

Here is the thing nobody really talks about when you start a photography business. The photography is maybe 40% of the job. The rest is emails, contracts, blog posts, social media, SEO research, Pinterest scheduling, client follow-ups, and a hundred small tasks that pile up faster than you can clear them.

I use tools like Sprout Studio to manage the client side of things, which helps a lot. And I spent years testing different CRMs, including Honeybook, looking for the right setup. But even with good studio management software, the content and marketing side was still eating my evenings.

That is where AI came in. Not to replace my voice or my decisions, but to handle the time-consuming, repetitive parts so I could put my energy where it actually matters.

What I Use AI For in My Photography Business

Here is a quick overview of everything I cover in this series. Each item links to its own dedicated post once it is live.

Blog post ideas and research

I use AI in combination with Ubersuggest to figure out what to write and whether anyone is actually searching for it. It sounds simple, but having a structured approach to content ideas has made my publishing schedule so much more consistent. 

SEO analysis and rewrites

I write all my own blog posts. But once they’re drafted, I use AI to check them against SEO best practices, flag anything missing, and help me tighten up sections that aren’t landing. I also use it to write my Yoast meta descriptions, which I used to find disproportionately annoying for something so short. 

Pinterest titles and descriptions

For every post I publish, I need two or three Pinterest pin variations with platform-specific copy. That is potentially nine short pieces of copy per post, per month. AI does this in a few minutes based on my blog post content, and the quality is genuinely good. 

A custom AI business app I built

This one gets its own dedicated post because it needs more explanation. I used Claude Code to build myself a browser-based control center for my photography business. It has a task board, a business coach I can actually talk to, a content gap analyzer, an affiliate income tracker, and more. I didn’t write a single line of code. 

AI-assisted photo selection for Instagram

This one is still very much a work in progress, so I’m including it because I’m also building in public in this series. I have been experimenting with using AI to look through my tagged Lightroom exports and suggest photos for Instagram based on a given topic. The foundation is working. The results are not perfect yet. 

What This Series Is and Isn’t

This is not a series about AI image generation. I am a photographer, and I have no interest in generating fake images. This is also not a series about replacing your voice, your creativity, or your client relationships with a chatbot.

What it is, is a series about using AI for the parts of running a business that don’t require your creative eye. The admin. The content calendar. The repetitive copy tasks. The research. The stuff that keeps you up when you would rather be editing photos from a shoot you loved.

I am also building this in public, which means you will see what is working, what isn’t, and what I am still actively trying to improve. I think that is more useful than a polished retrospective written once everything already works.

Where to Start If You Are New to AI

If you have never used an AI tool before, I would start with Claude or ChatGPT. Both have free versions that are genuinely useful. Claude is what I use for almost everything because I find it better at maintaining tone and writing in a way that doesn’t immediately sound like a robot.

You do not need to sign up for anything expensive. You do not need to learn to code. You do not need to be technical. You need a free account and some curiosity about what happens when you try things.

The learning curve is less steep than you think. Start with something small, maybe asking it to help you rewrite a caption that isn’t working, and go from there.