Most of us take thousands of photos each year with our phones. It is a long way from when I was growing up and I had a very old camera that only took black and white film. Each photograph was carefully chosen and then I had to wait till the film was used up before taking it to a chemist and waiting a couple of weeks to find out if any of the pictures had come out, or if they were out of focus or had my finger in front of the lens.

I have mentioned before that I like to study family history, and one of the challenges I have found is old photographs. My cousin Pat and I have lots of old pictures of family but most of them have no names and we struggle to work out who they are. The best we can do is to try to look for matches. For instance, I think that this photograph is my great great aunt Elizabeth Capener.

But Pat has this photo about 30 years later. Is it the same person?

For a long time I have worried that the massive photo collections we now have will be even harder to collate once we are gone. Photos are no longer special to us so although they have many meta tags on things like place and time, they don’t know who the people are.

I downloaded IOS 26 on my iPhone this week, and it is full of the latest AI tools. It can turn any photograph into a 3D image. It can create panoramas by merging photos. And it has the security of really good facial recognition. So the technology for matching faces is out there. But without being a professional developer I have not found an app that does it for me. Is there one?

Either way, such tools are coming, and I think that family historians will have an easier time in future. Or maybe we will simply be redundant when a bot just does all the work for us.

Anyway, are these photos Elizabeth? What do you think?

EDIT I have just used ChatGPT and it has done an incredible job matching the photos, pointing out things like the left eyelids being slightly droopy and the deep set eyes with identical spacing. They are likely to be the same person. Hello great great aunt Elizabeth!