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At a time when startup Rush culture is backwhen “locked up“Tech founders have even adopted”996“The way work is done — 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week — there’s something unpleasant about using an AI app to create your own fake vacation photos.
And yet, here we are.
Product Designer Laurent of the Kingwho recently joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, launching a side project called endless summerA Photobooth app for iPhone that creates AI-generated vacation photos of locations around the world. Here you are exploring a beach town, or overlooking a European city from your balcony. There you are shopping, having dinner with friends or at a social gathering.
It doesn’t look like anyone in these photos is talking about AI or entrepreneurship or lack of sleep.
King’s ace explained Sharing the launch on X, the new app is when “burnout hits and you need to unleash the soft life you deserve.”
(When you can’t live life, you might as well fake 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 is at that time of year.
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“As the season ended, I wanted to create something that felt like that. It was from this feeling that I reverse-engineered the product experience,” he says. “I created an Xcode project and started iterating directly from there, sculpting the code experience, so to speak.”
The experience he landed on was a simple user interface with a small camera preview button at the bottom of the screen. You tap the button to create an AI-generated “summer” photo Photos appear on your screen as you click, in a sort of camera roll-style view. Each photo features you, or rather an AI version of you, exploring the world and showing a fair amount of 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 changes to summer photo output.
The app isn’t saving your selfies, Del Rey says, unless you enable its optional auto-generation mode. Also, users can delete their account at any time with just two taps, which deletes everything.
Although nano-bananas are relatively cheap, they cost money. Because of that, you can’t create unlimited photos for free with Endless Summer. Instead, you’ll hit a paywall after your first six images, with prompts offering payment options even before that.
The price isn’t too bad if you want to dabble with personalized AI imagery out of curiosity — or if you’re lamenting missing summer vacation this year.
It’s $3.99 to create 30 images, $17.99 for 150 and $34.99 for 300. You can enable or disable a “room service” mode that automatically delivers two photos to you every morning, featuring your most recent summer escape and world trip. 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, showing you in different costumes.
The photos themselves have a vintage film aesthetic, making them look like the casual lifestyle photos they are supposed to resemble. This brings a sense of nostalgia to the app, as it evokes a mid-2000s feel.
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 images, there’s a yearning among some for a less curated, less “technologically perfect” version of life.
How weird is it that AI is bringing it to you now?
