Too burnt out to travel? This new app fakes your summer vacation photos for you

In a time when startup culture has made a comeback, and “locked-in” tech founders have embraced the “996” way of working — 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week — there’s something dystopian about using an AI app to create fake vacation photos of yourself.

However, here we are.

Product designer Laurent Del Rey, who recently joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, has launched a side project called Endless Summer, an iPhone photo booth app that creates AI-generated vacation photos starring you in locations around the world. Here you are exploring a beach town, or overlooking a European city from your balcony. There you are, out shopping, having dinner with friends, or at a social gathering.

It doesn’t seem like anyone in these photos is talking about artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship, or lack of sleep.

As Del Rey explained when sharing the launch on X, the new app is for when “burnout strikes and you need to manifest the smooth life you deserve.”

(When you can’t live life, it’s better to pretend to be, 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 feels during this time of year.

“As the season ended, I wanted to create something that had that feeling,” he says. “From that feeling I reverse-engineered the product experience.” “I created an Xcode project and started iterating directly from there, sculpting the code experience, so to speak.”

The experience he arrived at was a simple UI with a small camera preview button at the bottom of the screen. You can click the button to take a “summer” photo generated by artificial intelligence. As you click, images appear on your screen, in a sort of camera roll style view. Each image shows you, or rather the AI ​​version of you, exploring the world and looking rather content while doing so.

Behind the scenes, Gemini’s Nano-Banana photo model does the heavy lifting, with the app prompting the model for various variations of summer photo output.

The app doesn’t save your selfies, Del Rey says, unless you enable its optional auto-create mode. Additionally, users can delete their accounts at any time with just two clicks, wiping everything.

While nanobananas are relatively cheap, they do cost money. For this reason, you can’t create an unlimited number of images for free with Endless Summer. Instead, you’ll hit a paywall after the first six images, with a prompt suggesting payment options even before that.

The price isn’t too bad if you’re just looking to dabble with personalized AI images out of curiosity — or because you’re sorry to miss your summer vacation this year.

It costs $3.99 to create 30 images, $17.99 for 150 images, and $34.99 for 300 images. You can enable or disable Room Service mode that automatically delivers two photos to you every morning, including your latest summer adventures and travels around the world. You can also set your gender in the app or leave it up to guessing (“Auto” mode), and turn on or off an option that automatically saves AI photos to your iPhone’s camera roll.

There’s a recent option in the app that lets you create Halloween photos instead of summer photos, which show you in different costumes.

The photos themselves have a vintage film aesthetic, making them look like the casual lifestyle photos they’re supposed to resemble. This adds a sense of nostalgia to the app, as it evokes a feel of the mid-2000s.

This reflects other recent trends around online photo sharing. Whether it’s relying on outdated technology, like carrying disposable cameras, or posting Instagram photo dumps of blurry photos, there’s a desire among some for a less structured, less “technically perfect” version of life.

How strange is it that AI is bringing this to you now?