Over Half of Photographers Often Experience Editing Fatigue, Says Study

A woman with long blond hair sits at a desk, looking stressed. She holds her head with both hands while staring at an open laptop screen. A camera lens and a plant are visible in the background. The setting appears to be an office or a workspace.

A study looking at how long hours spent editing images affect the well-being of photographers has found that 50.4 percent suffer from mental exhaustion after a lengthy editing session.

The study was carried out by Neurapix — an AI editing platform that learns a photographer’s style and applies it to batch edits — and found that out of the 423 photographers surveyed most of them spent five to 10 hours per week editing (28.6 percent). 9.5 percent spent less than five hours per week, 22.5 percent spent 10 to 20 hours per week, and 17.5 percent spent over 20 hours per week.

A pie chart displaying weekly exercise duration categories. Segments include: less than 5 hours (9.5%), 5-10 hours (28.6%), 10-15 hours (22.0%), 10-20 hours (22.5%), and more than 20 hours (17.5%).
Survey question: How many hours per week do you typically spend editing your photos?

How much editing a photographer does is dependent on the work they do, for example, about a quarter of wedding photographers say they spend 10 to 20 hours per week editing, and one in five spend over 20 hours. School and family photographers spend a similarly long time editing but the group with the biggest proportion of 20-hour plus editing per week is landscape photographers with 22.2 percent.

A bar chart visualizing the amount of time photographers spend on different types of photography: wedding, event, business, kindergarten/family, portrait, landscape, and other. Data is divided into five categories of hours: <5, 5-10, 10-15, 15-20, and >20.
Survey question: How many hours per week do you typically spend editing your photos?

The study also looked at psychological pressure and mental exhaustion. Over 90 percent of photographers say they feel “generally” under pressure with the most common reason being deadlines or time constraints. Large workloads, client inquiries, and personal conflicts were all contributing factors to photographers feeling the heat.

A table displays percentages of different types of photography services and their frequencies. Categories include Wedding, Event, Business, Kindergarten & Family, Portrait, Landscape, and Other. Frequency options are Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often, and Very often.
Survey question: How often do you feel exhausted after long editing sessions?

Pressure is particularly felt by photographers who are just starting out (in the first to three years of business), only 12.5 percent of respondents from that group reported feeling no pressure. Conversely, 44.9 percent of photographers with over a decade of experience say they feel no daily pressure but have other bugbears such as client inquiries.

Blossoming photographers cited personal disputes as the most common cause of stress which apparently decreases as experience grows. All other levels of experience cite deadlines and time pressure as the biggest pressure triggers.

A bar chart illustrates the percentages of various symptoms among a group. Tiredness leads at 70.9%, concentration problems at 53.4%, headaches at 24.3%, eye strain at 47.3%, back pain at 37.6%, neck pain at 44.2%, and burnout at 18.7%.
Survey question: Which of the following symptoms have you experience as a result of image editing?

All the hours spent editing in front of a computer can lead to health issues, 70.9 percent of respondents cited fatigue as their main concern followed by difficulties concentrating (53.4 percent), eye strain (47.3 percent), and neck pain (44.2 percent). Other health issues mentioned include back pain (37.6 percent) and headaches (24.3 percent).

Around one in five of the photographers in the survey said they have sought medical assistance with the highest rates in the business (33.3 percent) and family (32.9 percent) photography group.

Skin in the Game

Any photographer who has undertaken a large editing job will attest that spending hours and hours in front of the computer making tweaks to hundreds if not thousands of images is tough going.

It’s what makes this study interesting but it is worth noting that the company who conducted it, Neurapix, has a specific interest in this because of its software which uses AI technology to batch edit images in the photographer’s style, therefore saving editing time.

To that end, the study says 61.7 percent of the respondents are using AI in their editing with more photographers from the younger generation deploying AI on their work.

The full study can be read here.


Image credits: Neurapix

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