MyHeritage Releases Photo Enhancer to Bring Blurry Photos Into Sharp Focus

MyHeritage Photo Enhancer upscales photos using breakthrough AI technology

TEL AVIV, Israel & LEHI, Utah–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#familyhistory—MyHeritage, the leading global service for discovering your past and empowering your future, announced today the release of the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer, a powerful new feature that brings blurry, low-resolution or low-quality photos into sharp focus. Photos are enhanced using specialized technology that produces outstanding, high-definition results.

The MyHeritage Photo Enhancer takes old or blurry photos and increases their resolution so that the faces that appear in them are crisp and well defined. The Photo Enhancer is powered by deep learning technology that was licensed by MyHeritage and seamlessly integrated into the company’s platform. It infers what the faces in the photos looked like with exceptional results. Enhancement is particularly useful for historical photos where the faces are often small and blurry, but works equally well on new color photos too. The feature works best on photos in which multiple people appear, and enhanced faces can be viewed one-by-one. The original photos remain intact and are not changed by the enhancement process, which creates separate versions alongside the originals.

“The MyHeritage Photo Enhancer joins a robust suite of technology-based features on MyHeritage that help people around the world connect with their family history in new and meaningful ways,” said Gilad Japhet, Founder and CEO of MyHeritage. “Following the recent success of our photo colorization feature, we saw photo enhancement as a natural next step, and are thrilled to integrate this technology into our family history platform. This addition makes MyHeritage the best platform for uploading, enhancing, and sharing historical photos, bar none. It also makes genealogy fun, as it should be.”

In February 2020, the company launched MyHeritage In Color™, an AI-based feature that colorizes black and white photos. The feature gained tremendous popularity, with 11.4 million photos colorized thus far and shared in abundance on social media. Enhancement and colorization complement one another, and users are invited to enhance photos that they’ve previously colorized, as well as other photos.

Integration with family trees

Millions of people around the world use the MyHeritage platform to explore their family history and digitally preserve their family photos. MyHeritage users have uploaded hundreds of millions of photos to the platform and enriched them with meta-data and tags, including the date, place, and individuals appearing in the photos. The MyHeritage Photo Enhancer provides users with a greater appreciation of their heritage through the scaled-up faces of their ancestors. Together with colorization, these innovative features delight users with new perspectives of their family history.

The MyHeritage Photo Enhancer is available on the MyHeritage platform and on MyHeritage’s free mobile app for iOS and Android, which is the perfect tool for scanning and digitizing old photos in physical albums. Photos that are enhanced and/or colorized can easily be shared with family and friends on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and other social media.

MyHeritage is committed to preserving the authenticity of historical documents, and therefore differentiates enhanced photos from the originals using a special embossed magic wand symbol in the bottom left corner of enhanced photos. In photos that were colorized, a similar palette symbol appears, and photos that were both enhanced and colorized feature both symbols side by side. This allows others to quickly determine if a photo has been modified. MyHeritage is strictly committed to the privacy of its users and ensures that photo enhancement and colorization take place exclusively on MyHeritage servers.

The MyHeritage Photo Enhancer is a freemium feature on MyHeritage. Ten photos may be enhanced for free, after which continued use of this feature requires a subscription.

About MyHeritage

MyHeritage is the leading global discovery platform for exploring family history and gaining valuable health insights. With billions of historical records and family tree profiles, and with sophisticated matching technologies that work across all its assets, MyHeritage allows users to discover their past and empower their future. Launched in 2016, MyHeritage DNA has become one of the world’s largest consumer DNA databases, with more than 4 million customers. The MyHeritage DNA Health test launched in May 2019 adds comprehensive health reports, some unique to MyHeritage, to help people understand how their genetics may affect their health and make informed choices to improve their future. As the world’s leading global service that combines family history and DNA testing for genealogy and health, MyHeritage is uniquely positioned to offer users a meaningful discovery experience that unites their past, present, and future. Available in 42 languages, MyHeritage is the most popular DNA test and family history service in Europe. www.myheritage.com

Contacts

MyHeritage

Rafi Mendelsohn

Director of PR & Social Media

Phone: 917-725-5018

Email: pr@myheritage.com