Technology no funeral director ever imagined would change their world.

A shoebox of four hundred photographs used to be a fortnight of work. Sorting them, dating them, working out who is who across seventy years of faces — the industry never attempted it, because the industry never conceived it would become possible.

We use simple, incredibly efficient and utterly accurate technology to catalogue and organise every image that comes through our door. Every photograph dated, grouped by era, its people and places identified and held in order. Four hundred photographs, catalogued in the time the kettle takes to boil. Not one of them mislaid, and not one of them misread.

For us it was simply a case of an idea, and the arrival of a technology that transcends every language and every nationality — because it goes straight to the source of the thing itself: human information, about people and places. A wedding is a wedding in any tongue. A back porch in 1963 is a back porch in 1963, whether the caption on the back was written in English, Samoan or Cantonese.

What the machine gives us is order. What we do with that order is the craft: the pacing, the grade, the chapters of a life. The technology clears the fortnight of sorting out of the way so that every hour we spend is spent on the part a machine cannot do.