No time to sift through your 1000’s of photos? New app launches to do this for you in just one click
On 20/09/2021, PastBook – a leading photo tech company and one Europe’s fastest-growing firms – launch an iPhone app that automatically sifts through and selects consumer’s best pictures, creating a priceless photo book in under 60 seconds. Using industry-first artificial technology, this is the only application to remove the onus from the user to select and curate their best 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. Today’s launch comes after a summer where Brits collectively took over 10 billion holiday snaps with PastBook estimating that over 90% will never leave clogged smartphones.
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 photobook.
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.”
Wouter Staatsen, CEO of PastBook said:
“I’m proud to be a part of what is a brilliant and talented team and I’m hugely excited to lead PastBook trailblazing into new frontiers, transforming the online photo industry. The launch of this app will be a pivotal point in the development of PastBook as the global, fabless platform for one-click photo products. In the past year, we have achieved tremendous growth in revenues internationally and the addition of this unique piece of IP will provide us with incredible potential for scale in the next few years.”
Stefano Cutello, founder of PastBook said:
“This app, and the technology behind it, has been in my mind since the very early days of PastBook, and I’m so proud to finally see it coming to life. I’m sure that it will provide people with a more effortless way to relive and enjoy their memories. Today is a landmark day for both the company and for myself after developing the app for over a year and a half. Since Wouter took the role of CEO in 2020, I have had more time to focus on the product and innovation to take PastBook to the next level both in terms of our offering and international scalability and growth. In that sense, it is hugely gratifying that the past 18 months have had the desired effect in allowing the product to advance significantly while maintaining the growth that has led us to be recognised by the Financial Times, Deloitte and Forbes.”
