Sundrop turns your endless baby photos into recaps, time lapses, and more — without AI

Sundrop is a new iPhone app that uses Apple's on-device AI to help parents rediscover their favorite photos and create keepsakes without uploading images to the cloud. New parents take a lot of pictures of their children, but those photos often end up languishing in photo galleries, never to be seen again after the initial snap and share. A new app, Sundrop, aims to make those pictures more useful by turning them into weekly recaps, highlights, time lapses of the child growing up, and other cute scenes, like putting the child’s photo on a magazine cover or a rookie card. While Google Photos and Apple Photos already provide extensive tools to organize and manage photos, Sundrop is taking aim at a particular niche: parents with a new baby (usually their first!) who take an overwhelming number of photos and want to do more with those pictures.

The app was developed over the past few months by the same team behind the read-it-later app, Matter: Ben Springwater, Sky Lan, and Rob Mackenzie (all dads themselves). Notably, Sundrop claims it is designed to be private, and processes all photos locally on the device it is installed on. To make this possible, Sundrop taps into Apple’s Vision framework and on-device Core ML (machine learning) models instead of uploading photos to a cloud server