Haleh Shoa, founder and CEO of Picturli, a photo organization and archiving studio that helps families, individuals, and businesses transform their photo collection into one sortable digital library, shares the unique family trauma that led to the start of her company, the lessons she learned from the corporate work with Apple and more, how she’s keeping people’s memories secure in the digital age, a connection to Cher, curating collections spanning almost 180 years, accidentally uncovering secret families, and using technology to uncover hidden history.

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.