The GoodOnes App offers an AI for selecting your better photos
News | By Stephan Jukic | February 2, 2023
GoodOnes is an AI-based photo recommendation app whose creators claim it can effectively sort photographers’ good shots from bad ones.
Any prolific photographer who’s managed to accumulate reams of cloud-stored photos they just don’t quite get around to editing knows how tedious the job of sorting can be.
The GoodOnes app claims that its internal AI engine lets the platform handle this job for photographers and bring order even to enormous photo libraries.
How true this is, and especially for more abstract photographic styles, is something we’ll have to see.
According to the creators of GoodOnes, the app connects to a user’s Google Photos or iCloud photo account archives and then works its way through them in helping a photographer select their “best” shots from even haphazard archives of images.
Now you might at this point be wondering how you can try GoodOnes if you don’t have or use Google Photos or iCloud (I personally use neither and detest Google Photos for a number of reasons), but for this, the app doesn’t yet have an answer.
For those who have their shots in either of these two cloud platforms, the app has created an AI photo curation assistant that it calls “Ollie”. Ollie uses its internal machine-learning capabilities to sift bad photos from good photos and highlight the good ones for a user as recommendations.
Users can then swipe left or right to delete the photos or keep them based on Ollie’s suggestions.
View this post on Instagram
As a photographer or amateur user uses GoodOnes more often, the Ollie assistant becomes better at its job of selecting and recommending photos.
This is where the machine learning part does its job: it causes Ollie to learn about individual preferences and make future suggestions based on them.
Users can also use GoodOnes to create photo books or albums and to share their curated selections with friends. The app also lets you browse your increasingly organized collection of shots in case you’d like to tweak it further, or simply enjoy it.
View this post on Instagram
For now, we don’t clearly know just how good GoodOnes actually is. The app is still in beta testing mode and has an early access sign-up model working by which users pay but use the app while it’s still under development.
GoodOnes is however reasonably well-funded and has some experienced talent behind it. The Israeli startup that developed the app was recently the recipient of $3.5 million in VC seed funding for further AI research into its core functions.
The company’s co-founder, Israel Shalom, previously worked as a product and engineering lead dev at both Google and Dropbox. He has also spent time with the IDF’s (Israeli Defense Forces) elite 8200 intelligence unit, which is known for seeking particularly talented coders and hackers.
None of these things guarantee that the GoodOnes app is actually good, but they do inspire a bit of optimism about its curation abilities, especially in today’s world of rapidly improving AI technology.
Once the app goes live for all audiences as a fully-finished product, it might also deliver better results than what it’s offering users now.
According to CEO Shalom in an interview with the site No Camels, “We focused on building a fun and easy-to-use platform to help people go from cluttered camera roll to photo-zen,”
The CEO and coder also claims that the app will let users scroll their images cleanly by removing distractions such as random screenshots, receipt photos, or repeat photos that often clutter cloud photo storage accounts.
Shalom’s own experience is what prompted his new development. As he explains:
“Like so many parents, having children turned my phone into a blackhole of thousands of photos. Capturing your children’s special and everyday moments should be a positive experience – but it can quickly become overwhelming and impossible to navigate. As a product and engineering leader from Google and Dropbox, I was surprised a solution hadn’t yet been developed. The industry to date has been focused on cloud storage, yet we knew there was a better way.”
GoodOnes seeks to eliminate or at least minimize these problems.
An executive of the lead VC funding partner for the app also agrees. According to him, “When most people open their photo apps on Apple or Google, they experience anxiety rather than delight.
He added that “Instead of seeing the photos they care about, their gallery is scattered with rubbish. GoodOnes creates a clean photo experience, where every photo they look at has significance and meaning.”
If you’re a photographer or hoarder of personal photos who sympathizes with these contexts, GoodOnes might be worth a try.
The app’s website offers an early access waitlist where users can sign up if they’re interested in giving GoodOnes a spin.
Image credit: Header image from GoogOnes website homepage
Check out these 8 essential tools to help you succeed as a professional photographer.
Includes limited-time discounts.
Stephan Jukic is a technology and photography journalist and experimental photographer who spends his time living in both Canada and Mexico. He loves cross-cultural street photo exploration and creating fine art photo compositions.
