sample photo from My Heritage website
Toronto. I received an email from past president Les Jones this weekend noting that a genealogy web site is using AI to estimate the date of a photo based on its contents.
Since the service (called PhotoDater) is used within a browser, it likely works with any OS. The site My Heritage has a two week ‘free’ membership which must be used to access PhotoDater.
Once a photo is uploaded following the site’s protocol, an estimated date is usually suggested plus the statistical variance (eg. 1946 +- 5 years). Check out the site and see if it appeals to you (especially image collectors with uncertain dates for photos). The Photo Dater technology according to My Heritage was ‘educated’ with a huge number of accurately dated historical images.
Skeptical? Check out the various ‘PhotoDater’ Youtube videos to see how My Heritage puts AI to work as a realistic ‘dater’ of old photos. From my own perspective, AI is really helpful doing the repetitive routine analysis and adjustments we make day to day.
I use Topaz Photo AI on this site at times. Each iteration of the application seems to improve the results. It is often impressive and often a disaster. Still lots of room for improvement. It seems to do a strikingly good job on some things (ie the odd portrait) but has a ways to go (ie, realizing the shape of screw heads on cameras for example). I like its upsizing for the most part, and its de-noise function but often fall back to using ‘Focus Magic’ for out of focus images.
