Sundrop turns your endless baby photos into recaps, time-lapses and more — without AI

New parents take a lot of pictures of their children, but those photos often end up languishing in photo galleries, never to be seen again after the initial snap and share.

A new app, Sundrop, aims to make those pictures more useful by turning them into weekly recaps, highlights, time-lapses of the child growing up, and other cute scenes, like putting the child’s photo on a magazine cover or a rookie card.

While Google Photos and Apple Photos already provide extensive tools to organize and manage photos, Sundrop is taking aim at a particular niche: Parents with a new baby (usually their first!) who take an overwhelming number of photos and want to do more with those pictures.

The app was developed over the past few months by the same team behind the read-it-later app, Matter: Ben Springwater, Sky Lan, and Rob Mackenzie (all dads themselves).

Notably, Sundrop claims it is designed to be private, and processes all photos locally on the device it is installed on. To make this possible, Sundrop taps into Apple’s Vision framework and on-device Core ML (machine learning) models instead of uploading photos to a cloud server or some other hosted AI service.

Both of the child’s parents can use Sundrop together by linking their accounts, which allows the app to sync their shared photos via Apple’s iCloud service. This feature, the company says, means the pictures aren’t sent to any external servers it runs.

In addition, the team notes that no generative AI is used in the creation of its scenes or highlights.

This differentiates it from many photo editing apps on the market, including Google’s, which are increasingly tapping generative AI to create new versions of your photos.

To find highlights and recaps, Sundrop scans pictures in the parents’ respective Camera Rolls on their iPhones, skipping things like screenshots or duplicates. It then creates highlights or fun scenes, which it calls “drops.”

One of these is a recap of the week every Sunday, announced as a Lock Screen notification. Others can put two siblings side-by-side at the same age, generate a time-lapse series of photos or a video of a kid growing up, or cut out a photo of the child and place it into a layered template.

Parents can also manually edit the photos Sundrop uses to make its creations, or use the app to automatically organize the best photos into galleries with other similar shots.

The app costs $39.99 per year, and offers a week-long free trial. The annual plan also includes Family Sharing, so only one parent needs to purchase it.

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