Show HN: AI-Augmented Photo Albums

Hi HN, so I realized that there's no real digital equivalent to the good old (analog) photo album. Yes there are Google/Apple Photos or Flickr/Instagram for organizing and sharing photos. But none of those seems to embrace the idea of a photo album as a space for presenting your photos.

On the other hand, there are services for creating physical photo albums, but for those the digital album is just an intermediate step for the actual goal of ordering a physical copy.

My idea of a digital-first photo album:

- The overall goal is to create a pleasant viewing experience on any screen

- The design of the album should change depending on the photos

- There should be a way of annotating and decorating the album

The first version I made felt a little empty, so I tried coming up with a way of generating suitable backgrounds for each photo. My first idea was using a GAN to generate abstract background patterns, but I couldn't really produce meaningful results with that approach. So in the end I trained a neural net to predict emojis for a given photo, and use these emojis as a background pattern. The predictions aren't perfect, sometimes even comically off, but overall pretty decent for a 7.7MB model that's running in the browser.

For the privacy-conscious it might be worth pointing out that, up to the point where you actually sign up, the whole onboarding process is happening only in the browser, without sending data to the server. So if you want to try it without giving up any data, you can do so.

Also pretty surprising that the domain was still available.