Evoto Alienated Photographers By Releasing a Tool Designed to Replace Them

Evoto has had a tough week. While the AI photo editing software company was on hand at Imaging USA 2026 in Nashville, a major photographic industry conference full of working professionals, news broke that the company was testing an AI Headshot Generator that promised to help users save on studio costs by bypassing professional headshot photography services altogether. The move has been criticized as tone-deaf, and Evoto quickly scrambled to try to undo the damage.

Update 1/16: Evoto has supplied an additional statement to PetaPixel, which is included at the end of this article.

What Happened?

As expected, once the Evoto’s AI Headshot Generator appeared online, photographers were livid. Evoto has long marketed itself squarely at working professional photographers, promising to help them speed up their workflows and retouch their shots more quickly with carefully designed AI tools. Evoto has, and still is, focused on helping photographers with end-to-end workflow tools. The company has always been about empowering real, actual humans.

So when Evoto’s AI Headshot Generator appeared, making claims that it would help people get cheap, professional headshots without needing to deal with a photographer, it appeared to be a real slap in the face of Evoto’s customer base of photographers, including ones who make their living doing, you guessed it, professional headshots in a studio.

The AI Headshot Generator tool also raised questions about how Evoto may have been using its customers’ photos and data to train a new AI-based tool. It’s a reasonable question, considering that Evoto is an AI editing tool with direct access to professional photos, including countless portraits and headshots captured by real people. AI has to be trained somehow.

The Response Among Photographers

“What is going on here? How/Why do this to their customers? They took their customer’s money, and possibly their customer’s own editing techniques, to then turn around and create an AI headshot app? How can this even be real?” one Reddit commenter wondered.

Professional photographers, including those who have worked with Evoto before, were likewise outraged. Photographer Sal Cincotta, a very early ambassador of Evoto, skewered the company in a video published this week. While Cincotta is not immune to controversy in the photography space, his sentiments in this case are echoed essentially universally.

“I’m one of Evoto’s first ambassadors,” Cincotta says in the video above. “Obviously I’ve got to step away from that and rethink that because [Evoto is] trying to hurt the very people that I’m trying to help. [Evoto is] trying to hurt me, my business, my career, my earnings.”

“You’ve got to see what’s coming for us,” Cincotta says later.

A big part of Cincotta’s entirely reasonable anger is that it looks like Evoto trained this new AI Headshot Generator using its customers’ images, which, frankly, would make a lot of sense. Evoto is adamant this is not the case, but nobody is obliged to believe the company. And some people will never believe Evoto, clearly.

Some, including Cincotta, also don’t believe that Evoto will really shelve this AI Headshot Generator, despite the company’s claims. Again, it would make sense for Evoto not to abandon its efforts, which the company has spent significant time and money on already. Evoto, a relatively small company, reportedly hit just over $4 million in revenue last year. Development costs for a new tool, such as an AI Headshot Generator, would represent a significant portion of that revenue.

As Cincotta and many others have noted, it is a terrible look for Evoto to have sloppily unveiled a beta version of a tool expressly designed to replace the work its current customers do.

Evoto’s First Response Did Little to Decrease the Anger

For its part, Evoto responded to the outrage and controversy in a similarly slapdash way. The first statement released on January 12 didn’t do much to quell the anger.

Hey group members

We received a message from headshot photographers at Imaging USA today regarding how we handle AI. Evoto frequently utilizes Beta environments to test emerging AI capabilities and explore alternative technical boundaries. These internal pilots allow us to evaluate new technologies in a controlled setting before determining their fit within our professional ecosystem.

One such technical pilot, an AI Headshot Generator, recently moved into a phase of visibility beyond our intended roadmap for general release. We want to clarify that this experiment was never intended to supplement or serve as a professional workflow tool. Because we are committed to maintaining the highest professional standards, we have concluded this test and removed the feature. We remain focused on our core mission: developing the advanced retouching and editing tools that empower professional photographers to refine their unique, human-driven artistry.

As expected, this explanation didn’t sit very well with photographers. It is hard to believe that Evoto’s AI Headshot Generator “moved into a phase of visibility beyond [Evoto’s] intended roadmap for general release” when it was fully accessible to users online and even went live with a FAQ section. It sure looked polished and intended for the public, even if, as Evoto says, it went live early. It didn’t have the appearance or the makings of a barely finished beta test by any stretch. It had pricing, testimonials, sample shots, and more.

Further, Evoto, which describes the AI Headshot Generator as “an experiment,” also claims that the tool was “never intended to supplement or serve as a professional workflow tool.” That doesn’t hold water. What software company builds a tool like this, which requires extensive training and development, without the intention of releasing it?

Speaking of training, this is another area of significant contention for photographers. How did Evoto actually design its AI Headshot Generator?

‘We Do Not Use Your Images to Train Our AI Models’ Evoto Says in Second Statement

In a follow-up statement seen below in full, Evoto says, in what it calls an “ironclad promise”: “We do not use your images or your clients’ images to train our AI models.” Evoto claims it sources its training data “exclusively through commercial licensed and purchased imagery.”

As for whether people believe it or not, that is up to them, but that is Evoto’s claim and stance.

Evoto continues, “Over the last 24 hours at Imaging USA, we’ve had some tough, honest conversations with many of you. You’ve expressed anger and concern over a technical pilot we were testing — an AI Headshot Generator.”

“We want to be clear: We missed the mark, and we are sorry,” Evoto says.

“As a tech company, we often test the boundaries of what’s possible. However, we realize that by testing a tool that generates images from scratch, we crossed a line. Evoto was built to handle the heavy lifting of retouching — not a tool that replaces the person behind the lens.”

Evoto then said it has “permanently removed” the AI Headshot Generator.

“Photography is about human connection, lighting, and the artist’s eye. We are returning our full focus to what we do best: building the world’s most powerful retouching tools to help you reclaim your time,” Evoto concludes. “Thank you for being loud. Thank you for holding us to the standard you deserve. We are listening, and we are committed to earning back your trust.”

Where Things Stand Now

While the outcome is the desired one, photographers are rightly skeptical. It doesn’t quite help with the whole apology that Evoto turned off comments on the Facebook post with its latest statement. It undercuts the messaging.

“I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that trust is everything. Once a company starts building tools that compete with its own users, it’s hard to unsee that,” a Facebook user comments on a different post that actually allows commenting.

Adobe knows how difficult trust is to win back. Getting rid of the stench of a major controversy is nearly impossible.

It is also staggering that Evoto’s AI Headshot Generator went viral during Imaging USA. Whether that was because it inadvertently went live early, as Evoto claims, or because Evoto entirely misjudged its launch, remains unknown, but it has the makings of sheer incompetence either way.

For a company that has almost entirely catered its business to working professional photographers, to develop, let alone release in any form, a tool whose sole purpose is to replace professional photographers is, as Evoto has learned this week, outrageous. It is a foolproof way to alienate a huge portion of a company’s customer base.

Added 1/16: Additional Evoto Statement

Evoto sent PetaPixel an additional written statement following publication, which is seen in full below:

To summarize our position: The Evoto team has listened closely to feedback over the past several days and have permanently removed the AI Headshot Generator from our future plans and from all official platforms.

We would like to clarify that this specific web-based tool was intended as a secondary page focused on SEO and driving web traffic; it was powered by a third-party API generative system. We recognize that the FAQ language on that page was misaligned with our actual practices and was included in error. We want to be clear: at no point was Evoto utilizing customer images for this tool or any other unauthorized purpose.

Evoto is fully committed to our policy of never using customer information or data without explicit consent and by direct request. Furthermore, we want to reassure our community that Evoto Desktop, our core product, runs and processes all images locally on your computer. This architecture ensures that your creative work remains under your control and within your local environment.

We agree that the AI Headshot Generator was misaligned with how Evoto serves and enables our community. We deeply appreciate the feedback regarding how this has impacted trust. Evoto remains dedicated to empowering photographers, and we promise to ensure our future initiatives align strictly with this mission.

Image credits: Evoto. Header photo created using an asset licensed via Depositphotos.