Writing this blog post about MyHeritage’s exciting new photo-dating tool was difficult — because I kept trying it out with one old family photo after another, instead of writing about it.
MyHeritage yesterday launched PhotoDater that estimates when a photo was taken.
This is a groundbreaking, free new feature that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. (I have a MyHeritage subscription and didn’t set up a free account to test to see if PhotoDater is indeed free for all as stated.)
One word describes it — Wow!
To test PhotoDater’s accuracy, I uploaded several19th-century photos that already had known dates. I was blown away that the tool always came within three or four years of the exact date and sometimes even the same year. Incredible.
Tip: You may need to wait up to 10 seconds before the estimated date appears. At first, I didn’t think the tool was working — because I didn’t wait the few seconds it requires for the tool to produce an estimate.
I’ve now pulled out portraits of mystery relatives to see if the estimated date will help me narrow down who each person could be.
On the downside, in the very few cases where there was little contrast between the person in the photo and the background, no estimated date was provided. I had the same issue with a couple of amateur photos of groups where the people were only partially visible or too small.
A photo of just a car or a scan of a historical record won’t receive a date estimate either.
PhotoDater will soon be available from our mobile web browser, and in the near future they’ll add it to both the MyHeritage app and the new Reimagine photo app.
MyHeritage has written an excellent blog post that explains how to use PhotoDater. You’ll find a link to try it out after the fourth paragraph.
On his blog, Scottish GENES, Chris Paton wrote an article about his test cases that’s worth a read.
