A new way to discover when family photos were taken

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22 August 2023
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Knowing the approximate date of an old photo could help you to work out which people are shown, or when a particular event such as a wedding took place
MyHeritage has announced the release of its free PhotoDater™ feature, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to provide an estimated date for old photographs

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.


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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. 

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. Whenever you view the Photo Page, if the photo is undated, PhotoDater™ will work automatically in the background to generate a date estimate. PhotoDater™ is currently available on the MyHeritage platform on desktop. Find out more at MyHeritage.