At a time when startups hustle culture is backWhen “has been closedTech founders have also adopted it996The working hours – 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week – using an AI app to generate fake holiday photos of yourself is somewhat dystopian.
And yet, here we are.
product designer laurent del reyWho recently joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, launched a side project endless SummerA Photobooth app for iPhone that creates AI-generated vacation photos showcasing you in locations around the world. Here you are exploring a seaside town, or overlooking a European city from your balcony. You are there, out shopping, having dinner with friends, or going to a social function.
It doesn’t look like anyone in these pictures is talking about AI or entrepreneurship or lack of sleep.
as del rey Explained While sharing launches on X, the new app is when “burnout hits and you need to manifest the softer life you deserve.”
(When you can’t live life, you might as well pretend to live it, right?)
The product designer told TechCrunch that he was inspired to create the app because summer is his favorite season, and he loves how life feels during that time of year.
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He says, “As the season ends, I wanted to create something that felt the same way. It’s in that spirit that I reverse-engineered the product experience.” “I created an Xcode project and started iterating straight from there, fleshing out the code experience.”
The experience he arrived at was a simple user interface where there was a small camera preview button at the bottom of the screen. You tap the button to create an AI-generated “Summer” photo. As you click, the photos appear on your screen in a sort of camera roll-style view. In each photo you, or rather an AI version of you, are exploring the world and looking quite content while doing so.
Behind the scenes, Gemini’s nano-banana image-model is doing the heavy lifting, as the app prompts the model for various forms of summer photo output.
The app isn’t saving your selfies unless you have its optional auto-generation mode enabled, says Del Rey. Plus, users can delete their account at any time with just two taps, erasing everything.
While the nano-banana is relatively cheap, it costs money. For this reason, you can’t create unlimited photos for free with Endless Summer. Instead, you’ll click on a paywall after your first six images, suggesting payment options even before that.
If you just want to enjoy personalized AI imagery out of curiosity – or because you’re regretting missing your summer holidays this year, the pricing isn’t too bad.
It’s $3.99 for 30 images, $17.99 for 150, and $34.99 for 300. You can enable or disable the “Room Service” mode that automatically delivers two photos to you every morning, including your latest summer trips and world tours. You can also set your gender in the app or leave it to guess (“Auto” mode), and turn on or off an option that automatically saves AI images to your iPhone’s camera roll.
A recent option in the app lets you create Halloween photos instead of summer photos, in which you appear in different costumes.
The photos have a vintage film aesthetic, making them look like casual lifestyle photos. This brings a sense of nostalgia to the app, as it evokes the feeling of the mid-2000s.
This reflects other modern trends around online photo sharing. Whether it’s embracing retro technology, like Zoomers carrying disposable cameras, or posting Instagram photo dumps of blurry photos, there is a desire among some people for a less-curated, less “technologically perfect” version of life.
How weird is it that AI is bringing it to you now?
