New app launches using AI tech to resurrect physical photos

As a nation we host over 10 billion photos in our phones – 53% of Brits rely on their technological devices to record and preserve their most treasured photos and memories. Now, as analogue may be headed for extinction with a speedily declining need for film, leading photo-tech company PastBook has launched an industry-first AI-driven app.

The technology revives the magic of analogue photography, automatically sifting through and selecting consumers’ best pictures, and creating a priceless photo book in under 60 seconds. Using industry-first technology Pastbook is the only application to remove the onus from the user to select and curate their best digitally stored photos. The unique AI tech automatically analyses image quality and context, and removes duplicates/similar photos, to ensure the best albums are created with minimal time invested by the user.

You can download the iPhone app here. More materials can be found in the App launch media kit.

Key App Features:

AI technology (patent pending)
Automagically selects the best photos to use in less than 60 seconds
Uses both metadata and histograms to identify highlights
Discards low quality or near-similar images
Organises users’ best images into a personalised photo book

How the App Works:
The thumbnail based application uses both metadata and histograms to identify highlights, such as people, activities, landscapes and travel. It also discards low quality or near-similar images, such as old receipts and rental car records. Clustering those that work well together based on content, beauty recognition software, and aesthetic, the app then utilises a mixture of landscape, face, and object imagery to layout an aesthetically pleasing photo book.

PastBook’s app is available to download from the App Store here.

On average, Brits hold over 7,500 pictures on their mobile phones, hosting snapshots of numerous holidays and trips, birthdays, reunions, first steps and first dates alongside the more mundane of our camera logs such as car dents, wifi codes, receipts and memory prompt screenshots. Managing them has now become one of life’s most neglected ‘adulting’ tasks, meaning our most treasured photos are often left to pile up into chaos on our mobile devices; data from PastBook reveals that 4.7m Brits worry that they will lose all their digitally stored memories when they next update their phone.

Since its launch in 2012, the firm has grown from a Web service, now launching its latest iPhone compatible app that aims to save Brits thousands of hours in photo organisation. Using proprietary artificial intelligence which has been in development for over a year, the app allows users to create a high-quality photo book with the minimum of effort by simply selecting a time range or location, the artificial intelligence does the rest.

The patented app discards our near-similar or unusable images, allowing users a hassle-free way to sort hoarded photos and preserve their most important memories. The technology offers an industry-first, enabling machine learning to select customers’ most poignant memories, as opposed to the onus being on the user to manually select the relevant images. Currently operating as a B2C proposition, PastBook’s B2B model is set to launch in 2022.

Daniel Scheijen, CMO of PastBook of the launch:
“With more and more consumers using their phones as their primary camera, our phone’s photo albums often turn into enormous piles of images that we will never have time to organise. Our app will find the needles in the haystack and turn these memories into a curated photo book in seconds. Users that have tested our app have described it as magical. I guess that sums it up.”