AI PHOTO SHOOTER

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client

Xero

year

2026

duration

8 weeks

location

Auckland, New Zealand

overview

AI Photo Shooter is an internal tool built for Xero’s small business customers, a form-driven system that builds a full product photo shoot without a photographer, location or crew. Pick a business type, build a hero character inside a real environment, then expand that single image into a complete shoot.

The project started as manual, one-off prompting and became a system anyone on the team can use without knowing how to prompt at all. Instead of a hand-written prompt per image, the tool takes plain selections, business, environment, style, mood, and generates a full suite of brand-ready photography.

approach

The foundation was 52 approved Xero brand photographs, used to define what Xero photography actually looks like before a single prompt was written. That benchmark shaped a two-step generation pipeline: a first pass builds the hero character and environment, a second atmosphere pass adds the grain, grading and lighting that make the image read as a photograph rather than a render.
By far the hardest challenge was consistency, and keeping the AI from hallucinating actions and locations that didn’t belong in the scene. Rather than leaving that to chance, an agent researches the chosen business type in the background and returns a list of actions and locations that business would realistically have — stripping leaves from a rose stem, standing at a wrapping station — and the user picks from that researched list instead of guessing at what might work.
Each shot also runs through a grid-based picker: four low-resolution options generate first, and only the one the user chooses gets rendered at full resolution. Detail is spent on the shot that’s actually wanted, not on four guesses.