Nick Peers explores MyHeritage’s impressive range of photo-management and editing tools
TECH TIPS
Over the past few years, MyHeritage (myheritage. com) has revamped its online photo-editing and management tools. The latest addition is PhotoDater, which estimates when the pictures you upload were taken (see last issue’s news story). However, in this beta stage it isn’t that accurate. The underlying artificial-intelligence (AI) engine has only been trained with a relatively small group of photos – tens of thousands rather than millions – from repositories such as the Library of Congress. Nevertheless, we’re hopeful that it will continue to be refined and the results will improve.
PhotoDater is just one of several new and enhanced features unveiled by MyHeritage since we last examined its photo tools in ‘Tech Tips’ in January 2021. So this issue we’ll take another look at those editing and tagging tools, with an emphasis on what’s changed. Note that two tools – Enhancement and Colorize – only allow you to process a limited number of photographs unless you subscribe at the ‘Complete’ level (£139 for the first year then £229 per year). You can still access (and tweak) previously coloured and sharpened photos, however, or use Photomyne (photomyne. com) instead; see the article on photo solutions in the September issue.
TOP TIP!
If you decide to accept PhotoDater’s suggested date by clicking ‘Save’, it’ll still be recorded as an estimate to make it clear that the date isn’t definitive.
1 Add Your Photographs After logging into your account at myheritage.com, click ‘Photos’ in the menu bar to access any images you’ve already uploaded. If necessary, click the ‘Upload’ button to add more photos – you can transfer files from your computer, or link to your Google Photos collection and import from there.
2 Check The Estimated Date All of your photos are displayed on one screen: click one to view it and access MyHeritage’s editing tools. You’ll see a date field beneath the file’s title. If the PhotoDater tool is confident of providing an estimated date, then this information will appear here.
3 Review The Estimate Click the estimated date to reveal a popup showing a wider estimated date range, plus how confident the AI is. This can be misleading – the above image is from around 1915, for example. If you know the estimate is incorrect, click ‘Reject’ followed by ‘Add’ to insert your own date. Otherwise click ‘Sa
