At startup hustle culture is backWhen “closedtechnology developers have even adopted “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.
And yet here we are.
Product designer Laurent Królwho recently joined the Meta Superintelligence Lab, has launched a side project called Endless summerphoto booth app for iPhone that creates AI-generated vacation photos of you in locations around the world. Here you can explore a seaside town or enjoy the view of a European city from your balcony. You are shopping, having dinner with friends or at a social gathering.
It doesn't look like anyone in these photos is talking about artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship, or sleep deprivation.
Royal Ace explained premiering on the X platform, the new app comes in handy when “burnout hits and you need to manifest the soft life you deserve.”
(When you can't live life, you might as well fake it, right?)
The product designer told TechCrunch that he was inspired to create the app because summer is his favorite season and he loves living at this time of year.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
“At the end of the season, I wanted to create something that would evoke a similar feeling. It was this feeling that changed my experience with the product,” he says. “I created an Xcode project and started iterating directly from it, sculpting the behavior of the code, so to speak.”
The experience he went for is a simple user interface with a small camera preview button at the bottom of the screen. You tap a button to generate an AI-generated “summer” photo. When clicked, the photos appear on the screen in a camera roll-like view. Each photo shows you, or rather the AI version of you, exploring the world and looking quite happy.
Behind the scenes, Gemini's Nano-Banana image model does the hard work as the app prompts the model with different variations of the summer photo.
Del Rey says the app doesn't save your selfies unless you have the optional auto-generate mode turned on. Additionally, users can delete their account at any time with just two clicks, which deletes everything.
Although Nano-Banana is relatively cheap, it does cost money. For this reason, you cannot generate unlimited photos for free in Endless Summer. Instead, you'll hit a paywall after the first six images, and even before that, you'll be prompted with payment options.
The prices aren't that bad if you just want to play around with personalized AI images out of curiosity – or because you're lamenting missing out on the holidays this year.
It costs $3.99 to take 30 photos, $17.99 for 150 and $34.99 for 300. You can turn on or off the “Room Service” mode, which automatically delivers you two photos every morning showing your latest summer escapades and world travels. You can also set your gender in the app or leave it guessed (“Auto” mode), and enable or disable the option to automatically save AI images to your iPhone's Camera Roll.
The latest option in the app allows you to generate Halloween photos instead of summer ones, showing you in different costumes.
The photos themselves have a vintage film aesthetic, which makes them look like the everyday lifestyle photos they're supposed to resemble. This brings nostalgia to the app as it evokes the atmosphere of the mid-2000s.
This reflects other modern trends in sharing photos online. Whether it's embracing retro technology like zoomers wearing disposable cameras or posting screenshots of blurry photos on Instagram, some people crave a less curated, less “technically perfect” version of life.
How weird is it that now it's AI that brings it to you?
