Developer discovers AI photo merging is far harder than expected, requiring 200+ iterations to handle real-world challenges like damaged old portraits and mismatched eras.

Initial assumption that merging two photos with AI would be a simple weekend project proved drastically underestimated

Modern AI image models work well with clean, well-lit photos but struggle with real-world scenarios like damaged vintage portraits, different decades, varying poses, and mismatched formality levels

After 200+ test iterations, the developer learned that stable results require much more than prompt engineering alone

Existing tools only showcase merges between high-quality modern photos and don't address the harder problem of combining sources from different eras with quality issues