MyHeritage PhotoDater™ – Helps You Date Those Old Family Photos

MyHeritage PhotoDater™ is HERE! So I’ve know about this new AI feature at MyHeritage since RootsTech earlier this year and FINALLY it is available for all MyHeritage users!

Have you ever found old family photos, but have no clue when they were taken? Perhaps you flipped them over hoping to find more details, only to discover they don’t have any? In the past, details about the photos would have remained a mystery, but here at MyHeritage, we set out to find a solution. Today we’re excited to announce the release of PhotoDater™, a groundbreaking, free new feature that estimates the year a photo was taken using AI technology.

MyHeritage PhotoDater™ – TRY IT NOW!

PhotoDater™ is one-of-a-kind: MyHeritage is the only genealogy service that offers date estimation for historical photos. Using powerful technology developed by our AI team, PhotoDater™ gives its best guess when a photo was taken. This can help you unlock further clues about who appears in the photo and the event at which it was taken, to solve mysteries in your genealogy research. PhotoDater™ is completely free!

MyHeritage PhotoDater™: How It Started

Our Founder and CEO, Gilad Japhet, came up with the idea for PhotoDater™ and first described it in his presentation at RootsTech in 2020.

MyHeritage PhotoDater™: How It Works

PhotoDater™ uses a proprietary machine learning algorithm developed by MyHeritage to provide an estimate of the year when a photo was taken. The date estimation algorithm was trained on tens of thousands of curated, definitively dated historical photos to help the algorithm understand nuances such as clothing, hairstyles, facial hair, furniture, and other objects that are characteristic of a particular decade.

The historical photos used to train the model came from open-source repositories such as the Library of Congress. Photos uploaded by MyHeritage users and stored on the company’s servers were not used to train the AI model.

The algorithm provides date estimates for undated photos taken between 1860 and 1990, for which it is reasonably confident it can return results with high accuracy. Estimates are calculated only for photos that do not already have a date in the metadata, that include people, and that are actual photographs, not documents or gravestones. A photo of just a car or a scan of a historical record won’t receive a date estimate. Date estimates can be reviewed and saved by you to the photo’s metadata, or dismissed. If you prefer not to see any date estimates, you can turn off PhotoDater™ from the site settings menu.

Extensive testing of the algorithm’s accuracy, conducted using definitively dated photos that were not used in the original training set, revealed the estimates to be extremely accurate, not just on a decade level, but often closer to an actual year. Analysis of the testing set, displayed in the graph below, shows that for approximately 60% of the photos, PhotoDater™ provided date estimations that were within 5 years of the actual dates the photos were taken.

MyHeritage PhotoDater™ – TRY IT NOW!

Using photo date estimates in family history research

Date estimates are valuable clues that can further your family history research. By figuring out when a mystery photo was taken, it becomes easier to identify who appears in it, and deduce what event it was taken at, such as a wedding or other milestone. For example, if the date estimate suggests that Grandma and Grandpa were married in 1931, based on their wedding photo, and you remember Grandma saying she got married when she was 23, or you can gauge her age from her appearance in the photo, you can narrow down her birth year to circa 1908. Nevertheless, it’s important to remember that date estimates are just that: estimates. While PhotoDater™ may narrow down the year with very high accuracy, it can be off by several years. This is why, if you choose to save the date estimate to the photo metadata, it appears as an estimated date in GEDCOM format, rather than an exact one.

MyHeritage PhotoDater™: Accessing

To use PhotoDater™, visit MyHeritage and click “Photos” in the main menu. If you have undated photos that aren’t on MyHeritage yet, upload them first to receive PhotoDater™ estimates.

Click HERE for more instructions at the MyHeritage blog post Introducing PhotoDater™, an Exclusive, Free New Feature to Estimate When Old Photos Were Taken.

MyHeritage PhotoDater™: Privacy

Photos that are uploaded to MyHeritage by users were not used to train the AI model. When PhotoDater™ processes a photo to give a date estimate, this is done on MyHeritage’s servers and the photo is not shared with any third party.

Many users will no doubt enjoy gaining new insights through this feature, while others may prefer to avoid estimates and only rely on hard facts. If you prefer not to receive date estimates for your photos, you can disable PhotoDater™ from the site settings menu by clicking My Privacy > Content and unchecking the box for PhotoDater™.

MyHeritage PhotoDater™: Availability

PhotoDater™ is a free feature that is currently available on the MyHeritage platform on desktop. PhotoDater™ will be available from your mobile web browser very soon, and in the near future we’ll be adding it to both the MyHeritage app and the new Reimagine photo app.

Try MyHeritage PhotoDater™ today!

Historical photos provide us with a tangible link to our ancestors and enrich our family history discoveries. With the addition of PhotoDater™, photos are more than heirlooms to be viewed and appreciated; they’re also tools for unlocking new discoveries. While date estimates should still be taken with a grain of salt, they may lead to breakthroughs in your research. Since 2020, we’ve developed innovative features for family photos, and as always, there’s much more to come. In the meantime, we invite you to upload your photos to MyHeritage and try PhotoDater™ today!

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