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

In a time of start-up The hustle culture is backwhen “locked up“Tech founders even have the “996“way of working – 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week – there is something dystopian about using an AI app to generate fake holiday photos of yourself.

And yet here we are.

Product designer Laurent DelReywho recently joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, launched a side project called Endless summera photo booth app for iPhone that takes AI-generated vacation photos starring you in locations around the world. Here you can explore a seaside resort or look out over a European city from your balcony. There you are, shopping, eating out with friends or at a social gathering.

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

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

(If you can’t live life, you might as well pretend, 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 that time of year.

“At the end of the season, I wanted to create something that felt like this. From that feeling, I reverse-engineered the product experience,” he says. “I created an Xcode project and immediately started iterating from there to shape the code experience.”

The experience he landed on was a simple user interface with a small camera preview button at the bottom of the screen. You tap the button to take an AI-generated “summer photo.” As you click, the photos appear on your screen, in a sort of camera roll style. Each photo shows you, or rather an AI version of you, exploring the world and looking quite content while doing so.

Behind the scenes, Gemini’s Nano-Banana image model does the heavy lifting, as the app prompts the model for different variations of the summer photo output.

The app won’t save your selfies, Del Rey says, unless you have the optional auto-generation mode enabled. Moreover, users can delete their account at any time with just two taps, which will erase everything.

Although Nano-Banana is relatively cheap, it does cost money. For that reason, Endless Summer doesn’t allow you to take unlimited photos for free. Instead, after your first six images, you’ll hit a paywall, with a prompt suggesting payment options before then.

The price isn’t too bad if you just want to play with the personalized AI images out of curiosity – or because you’re complaining that you missed your summer vacation this year.

It costs $3.99 to take 30 images, $17.99 for 150 and $34.99 for 300. You can enable or disable a ‘Room Service’ mode that automatically delivers two photos to you every morning, showcasing your latest summer getaways and world travels. You can also set your gender in the app or leave it guessing (‘Auto’ mode) and enable or disable an option that automatically saves the AI ​​images to your iPhone’s camera roll.

A recent option in the app lets you take Halloween photos instead of summer photos, showing 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. That brings a sense of nostalgia to the app, as it evokes a feeling of the mid-2000s.

This reflects other modern trends around online photo sharing. Whether it’s adopting retro technology like zoomers wearing disposable cameras, or posting photo dumps on Instagram with blurry photos, some long for a less carefully curated, less “technically perfect” version of life.

How bizarre is it that AI now brings you that?