New parents take a lot of pictures of their babies, but most of those photos sit in a camera roll and rarely get looked at again. A new app called Sundrop wants to change that by turning the pile into something people actually revisit.
Sundrop creates weekly recaps, highlights, time-lapse videos of a child growing up and other playful scenes. It can also place a child's photo on a magazine cover or a rookie baseball card. The app is designed for parents with a new baby, usually their first, who end up with an overwhelming number of photos and want to do more with them.
Google Photos and Apple Photos already offer extensive tools for organizing and managing pictures. Sundrop is not trying to compete with them on general photo management. It is going after a narrower group: parents who want their baby pictures turned into something finished.
The app was developed over the past few months by the team behind Matter, the read-it-later app. The developers are Ben Springwater, Sky Lan and Rob Mackenzie, all of whom are fathers themselves.
Does Sundrop process baby photos on the device?
Privacy is a central selling point. Sundrop says it processes all photos locally on the device where it is installed. To do that, the app uses Apple's Vision framework and on-device Core ML machine learning models, rather than uploading photos to a cloud server or a third-party hosted AI service.
Two parents can share the app by linking their accounts. Shared photos sync through Apple's iCloud service. The company says the pictures are not sent to any external servers it operates.
Does Sundrop use generative AI to create its photos?
The team also says Sundrop uses no generative AI to create its scenes or highlights. That sets it apart from many photo-editing apps, including Google's, which increasingly use generative AI to produce new versions of users' photos.
To build its creations, Sundrop scans the photos in each parent's Camera Roll on their iPhone. It skips items such as screenshots and duplicates. The results it produces are called "drops." One is a recap of the week, delivered every Sunday as a Lock Screen notification. Others place two siblings side by side at the same age, generate a time-lapse series of photos or create a video of a child growing up. Another option cuts out a photo of the child and places it into a layered template.
Parents can edit the photos Sundrop uses for its creations. They can also let the app sort the best shots into galleries with similar images.
How much does Sundrop cost?
The app costs $39.99 per year and includes a week-long free trial. The annual plan includes Family Sharing, so only one parent needs to buy it.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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