Welcome to Let's Talk Legacy. I'm your host, Gary Michels, and today we're really excited to have our guests on Haleh Shoa is the founder and CEO of Pictuli, a photo organization and archiving studio that helps families, individuals and businesses transform their photo
collections into one sortable Digital Library. She firmly believes that our family histories and personal memories are some of the most valuable treasures we can have, and that preserving and sharing them is essential to leaving a legacy for future generations. And when I heard we were going to have you on as a guest today, I was excited, because my my wife and I have recently been talking about this. I know this is a big thing right now all across the world of people wanting to put
this stuff together. So tell us a little bit about your story and how the company got started.
Yeah. First of all, Gary, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I started Picturli in 2016 for several reasons. One was that during the span of my corporate career as an advertising executive, every time I had some slow moments at work, and because we had really great equipment, I would bring in the old family albums, and I would start digitizing those and sort of restoring the cracked
photos and things like that. And that was because the importance of that for me was because my parents left Iran during the Iranian revolution in 1979 and they could not take anything with them except the photo albums. And so it was like a couple of suitcases of photo albums. I always wondered, like, why are they bringing that? You know, because I was only eight,
I didn't have that insight. So I was so grateful when I found myself sort of really wanting to know my own story and history, knowing that I probably wouldn't be able to go back, and I haven't been so far.
What was that experience like for them? Did they ever share that with you? Have you ever gotten into that a little bit with them?
Yeah, we've, we've talked about it, and there's so many families that share our sort of trauma around that. And being able, you know, not being able to take anything with you and really being stripped of your identity. My father was a pharmacist. He has his PhD in pharmaceuticals, and he had one
of the largest pharmacies in Tehran. And there's so many people like my dad who were just stripped of their identity, because when he came here, they would not, you know, in United States, the standards they didn't understand, the standards that my father had studied under at the University of Tehran. So it's just so much trauma. It's not just leaving the home that you've built, it's leaving the business that you built and the person that you had built for, you know, 50 some odd years. And
we do talk about that. Of course, my dad is still with us. He's 97 Wow. You know, any opportunity I get, I do turn on that recorder, and I really hope that everyone does this, I just sort of turn on the recorder, on my phone, or put the video on and start asking him questions.
Why do people not do that more? Why do people not take the time to ask questions and dig deep into that. What do they take it for granted? Or is it more of a not knowing, or is it more of not knowing how? Or someday I'll get around to what do you think that is?
I think it's a little bit of everything. It's a little bit of a fear of stepping over boundaries. Honestly, it's not knowing how much our elders love talking about their past unless it's really mired in trauma. I know that in studying a lot of you know, just watching some documentaries about people who survived the Holocaust, they never, ever want to talk about that. And I understand that, like that level of trauma I get.
But outside of that, I think most people do want to talk about their trials and tribulations and how they survived and what their accomplishments were. I don't think there's any human alive that didn't hasn't experienced trauma, so it's it's just about sort of creating that space in order to allow for our, you know, not just our elders, but even our peers, our spouses, to talk about some of those
questions of you know, What's your earliest memory? Starting with that, it's such a great way to you know, you I can even ask my husband that, like, What's your earliest memory? And of course, the answer changes. I ask them that all the time, the answer changes often.
That's funny. Well, you actually started off with a little bit of a different professional background, spending 27 years as an executive creative producer in advertising for luxury brands such as Ritz Carlton. You worked with Apple, Jaguar, Land Rover. In fact, you led the global advertising launch of the iPad Mini managing assets across five different continents. How did the skills you developed in the ad world contribute to the idea for Picturli?
Well, I think when you're dealing with personal assets, you know, whatever that may be, whether it's a client's money or their memory. It's really private. So the things that I learned at Apple is really how to keep my clients assets behind a very thick wall. We deal with being in Los Angeles, we deal with a lot of high profile clients, and so that's something that I have to create from the beginning. And it doesn't even matter, even if my clients aren't high, high
profile. I want to make sure that everything that we do within the boundaries of the studio is very, very locked. So that was one of the things, is I have great IT team, and that was
from my experience in advertising. But then in terms of, like, the aspects of getting the work done, taking all the analog, all the old things that we have, like all the old VHS tapes and high eights and little digital videos and the various formats of slides and negatives that we could have, you know, inherited from our parents and grandparents, taking all that to digital so that we can, you know, rename and re date those digital files So it becomes a searchable and sort of a library
that was all sort of learned in terms of dealing in operations and knowing that how to handle assets in general. And of course, we also manage a lot of digital stuff. We've amassed so much digital we have these old computers, these old iPhones and old phones in general, and all of these things on various cloud services, and people don't even know. Like, where do I even
start with this? So you know all of that is my essentially, is my knowledge from learning how to manage assets when I was working in advertising.
So digging in a little further, what services does Picturli offer? Like, who would benefit the most from them? Would it be companies? Would it be individuals? And how does it work?
Well, I mean, the service is for people who really want to be able to pass on the legacy. That's one of the aspects. And secondly, for people who just want to enjoy it. I have actually a lot of clients who don't even have kids. They just, you know, they're like, you know, I've lived a long life. I'm 65 and I want to see my photos. I want to see the places that I've traveled to. So we help them gain access to their entire memory box, essentially. So
anything that's analog, right? The albums, the loose photos, anything that you can touch and feel, all the tapes, all the slides, all the negatives, we organize everything chronologically, and then we scan it or digitize it or transfer it. And once that happens, we rename and redate the files, and then, with their digital stuff, we go through, download everything, consolidate everything, and then we curate that, because we have so many screenshots and accidental
things. And, you know, we take photos of a particular instance, but then we could have 17 photos of that instance.
It will pick out your screenshots and double pictures and all that kind of stuff?
Exactly. And then we offer two different platforms for our actually, three different platforms for our clients. And then we put all of that on the platform where they can enjoy it, share it, download it. And of course, we offer a lot of various different types of creative offerings, photo books, gallery walls, video montages and so on and so forth.
Awesome. And is it all ages? Is it user friendly? Is it something that a person has to put together themselves, or is there a higher level of surface where they can descend you everything and you guys do it? Or do they have to have some tech savvy?
They don't have to have any tech savvy at all. Most, a lot of our clients are sort of 60 and older, you know, they're empty nesters. And you know, of course, many 60 and 70 year olds could be very tech savvy, but regardless of the tech savviness, I have clients who are 85 they're not tech savvy, and they are elated with the product that they get. So I'm, you know, in that sandwich generation, I myself. I'm 55 so
I understand, and I'm a technologist. I've always been a tech geek, but I understand, you know, I have a mom is who's 84 a dad who's 97 and so I understand how to speak tech to those who are not techie. I mean, if they want to hire us as a coach, you know, we have a coaching program. If they wanted to take this on on their own, we can coach them along, and we can
give it on a list of equipment to purchase. But, you know, the equipment we have in this in my studio, we camera scan everything it is at the absolute highest resolution that you will ever have your stuff scanned at. And you know, we we also want to make sure that we are preserving the best quality of your digital
without going into technical detail. Most of us have our phones and computers optimized if we're on an iPhone, which means that we only have access to a 50% quality of what is on our phones or computers, because there really isn't enough space on our phones or computers to have the best quality download. However, those things are preserved at the highest quality in iCloud, and so we get access to iCloud. When we download the highest quality.
How do you know like when you send in stuff? How does your system know when these pictures were taken, if there wasn't dates put on them, when you said you kind of do them chronologically? How does that work?
That's a great question. We start every single project with a family tree, and we just get to know what did you look like when you were five? What did you look like when you were 10 and 15, and we basically guesstimate it based on the actual photo itself. There's a lot of clues in the actual photos that are from 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, the hardest decade, or 80s and 90s, because primarily everything is four by
six, and there's way too much of it. So we start with the albums that are already organized, which is why we always tell our clients, please don't take anything out of your albums, because you've already organized those somehow that we could use as clues. We start with the albums, and we know. So this is, you know, Eileen fifth birthday, you know, in 1985 and you know. And now she's eight. So this is the 1988 you know, and so on and
so forth. We spend a couple of hours with our clients in the onboarding process to learn, you know, who the characters are and what their date of birth, date of passing is.
If there's an extended family or a large group, can people team up together and have something put together like that?
Oh yeah, it's so fun. I personally, I come from a clan. I have 114 cousins spanning four generations. So I really, and I know all of them, almost all of them, I don't know some of their little ones, but so, yeah, I mean, when I have done, when I did my family sort of Vault, if you will, I have considered all of that like so with keywording and tagging, we are able to really make a an entire collection of a client, because a lot of times one person ends up with all the
family photos. It's usually like the older sibling that ends up or maybe the wealthier sibling that ends up with it so they could take care of it. The other family members want access to it as well.
You were talking earlier about security and how that was so important to you in your previous roles that you had with different companies. How do you maintain the security and the safety of these pictures and different things that are being sent to you? What's your process with that?
Well, we don't. We only use local hardware, and we back it up locally, so we have a local server, and then we have local external hard drives that we work with.
So privacy and security is a huge deal to you though.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have clients who who don't even want us to use the external hard drives that anything else is on. So we buy them their own servers. It's like $2,000 for a client to have their own private server.
So you work with some high profile clients. I understand, are you allowed to say who and how did they find you?
So in 2022 I worked with a company called Chrome hearts. They are a $1 billion fashion brand. They make these incredible jewelry and classes and, you know, really bespoke stuff that is very low quantity. In fact, they have three stunning stores in Las Vegas. It was a husband and wife team, and they hired me and my creative director at the time to basically curate 34 years of their assets, and they have shot every single famous person that ever was, particularly if
they're in the music industry. If you see Cher, that's all she wears, is Chrome hearts. And there's, there's some, some of the really close friends, that's all they ever wear. Jewelry wise and clothing wise is their stuff. That's exclusively how they sell their stuff. They're very, very exclusive. And that project was very like we were in a bunker, and no employee was
allowed to come into that bunker. It was that exclusive, yeah, and well, that particular project was about 1.7 million files that we had to look through, and we curated out 5000 we curated that so that they could create their legacy book, which they I don't think they are going to do that yet, but at least we started the project for them, and we made it a lot easier for them to be able to use these assets that were all over the map. They had some of their personal stuff in there
with their kids. It was really cool. It was really incredible.
You've been doing this for a bit now, and is there a couple success stories or one that comes to the top of your mind? Of anybody that that really touched your heart, that really showed the impact of you preserving these memories?
My gosh, so many. One of my earlier clients was an African American historian, and his family was from the north, and they had photos and letters dating back to the 1800s which is super rare for African Americans. And so he decided, like, you know, let's scan these and I'm just going to donate these letters and some of the photos to the Schomburg Institute in Washington, DC. So we scanned all the letters first, and it was. From his grandfather to his grandmother.
Three weeks after the Schomburg Institute got these letters, they called him and said, We just got another set of letters. And it looks like it's your grandfather, and it looks like he had another family. Maybe. What are the odds? What are the odds?
Wow.
Can you believe that?
Wait, he had another family? So in the other words, he was kind of married to two people, or what?
He had an affair of the heart with one of his distant cousins that he wrote letters to. And then when they found when she never had children, and when her kin found those letters, they donated those letters to the shrub Institute, which is also like, what, it's insane.
Ah, that's crazy.
So that is one, one insane story, another success story was we have a client who had who has the longest span of photographs in any of our collections. Her span came from the 1840s until now. So I literally had to learn everything about the history of photography with this client's stuff. And what had happened is her grandmother had gone through and named a lot of people on the back of the photos. And through
technology, we can actually do facial recognition. And so we found out that the grandmother actually had misnamed so many people because she couldn't see but when we scanned it and we could really hone in on the photo and really see people's faces a lot clearer. We could tell her, well, that's actually not your great aunt. It's it's the other sister. They look similar, but look, it's the other sister. And she was really pleased that we were able to do that, because she's also a sort
of a genealogist, and there's so many success stories. I mean, like every client is so pleased that their stuff is safe.
Yeah, and that's it just brings to life. People have always said, if there was a fire or whatever, where's your box of photos? Grab that, because there's so much memories, or memories are just in the palm of your hand, of your whole life that you've lived. It's so valuable and you can't replace it.
What I really appreciate about clients coming to us is that they understand, you know, my mom is getting old. She's losing her memory. We need to get going on this, because I need to ask her about these questions, right?
Yeah. So tell me, what does legacy mean to you, in general?
Leaving a piece of yourself that is filled with love, that's what that's what it means to me. You know, I want my legacy to when, you know, when my nephews grow up and they have their own kids and grandkids, I want them to look back and say, Wow, she really created something that was really created out of love and for love. I mean, really, that's really why I do this business. It's really a heart based business. I really want to bring joy to families and a peace of
mind. So it's the simple answer is, is love.
And it seems like this extends past just your personal it sounds it's to your business. Are all of your employees? Are there things that your culture, you've created in your culture of your employees and people that work with you. Is there a legacy that Picturli wants to leave to everybody?
You know, I see their humanity coming through when I go to a client and I download them on like, right now, we're working on a client who lost her son at the age of 21 which is the worst thing that can ever happen to anyone. So when I explain the backstory of how this happened to this kid. You know, I see their humanity coming through, and we really have to make sure that we hold the space of no judgment for all of our clients, regardless of their story, regardless of their
background. And so I see that really coming through, and I and I really appreciate that I've chosen these characters that I really I love my employees, right?
How do you, you know, a couple last questions for you, as technology evolves, which it always is, as you know, how do you see the future of digital memory preservation?
I mean, I think a lot of AI is already present in our in our lives right now, there are plenty of programs that people can download on their phones that will help them curate their sort of, their library mess. One program in particular is called Ollie O, L, L, i e, I think, and that's for iPhones. It basically goes through your stuff and says, I think these are great, but, you know, maybe these can be archived. I think AI is gonna really help us to be better
curators and better organizers of our memories. However, all of the older stuff that can get destroyed in a fire, in a flood, in any kind of a disaster, all of the things that could come out of a divorce say, you know, there's older couple that's getting a divorce, and there's all this fighting that happens with photos. All of that can be really mitigated by making sure your memories that are analog are properly digitized.
Sure. Do you have any future projects that you're working on right now?
I'm working on different packages for clients. We're doing some dig. Little packages that ends up with some year end photo books. And we have a lot of clients that really yearn for year end photo books, so we're creating packages around that.
That's really cool, and is most of the stuff that comes in now for that kind of stuff almost all digital, because the people do it on their phones all the time, is that the most common thing you're seeing are there still people that go get these days, even old fashioned pictures printed?
You know what's funny is that my younger employees, who are in their 20s, mid 20s, they are all about analog. They only shoot on film cameras. Apparently, cassettes are coming back in. Wow, cassette tapes, and there's a shortage on the market for cassette tapes. They love these high eight and digital video cameras they're shooting on that they're really going back to analog.
Wow, that's crazy.
It is crazy.
You've been such a joy to talk to. I really felt like it's just been a conversation, and I am just so excited myself to look into picturely more talk with my wife about it this weekend. And I'm sure our listeners, I'm sure are feeling the same way. How can someone get in touch with you? Check out your company. If they wanted to specifically ask you a question about their project. How would they reach you?
Well, they could visit our website, and I've created a seven step guide for anyone that wants to get inspired in order to start organizing their own photo collection. And they can visit picture life curated.com and they will find all the information on how to get a hold of me and how to download that picturelifecurated.com.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time today, that was awesome.
Thank you so much for having me.