Spencer
Exceptionally poor user experience
From the sample photos I'd seen, I was optimistic about this service, but it turned out to be a disappointment at every step. Off the bat, the photo upload process was buggy to the point that it took almost half an hour to upload 15 pictures. Trying to batch upload pictures would cause delays of minutes, so I had to do them one by one. For almost every picture, I got an indecipherable error message at least once while trying to upload (something about JSON not being formatted correctly). Sometimes two or three times. Furthermore, sometimes a picture upload would give an error message, I'd try to upload it again, and then see that despite the error message, the previous upload had succeeded, and have to remove the duplicate. Once I finally got them uploaded and went to the image generation step, the site said that only 3 of the 15 pictures were acceptable for training. I tried to figure out why, and discovered that the automated photo review process had broken down on 12 (!) of the pictures, causing the site to say they weren't approved. I then had to delete the 12 pictures and manually re-upload them AGAIN from this page, at which point the site finally ran the approval process for each. All 12 of the pictures which the site originally said weren't suitable passed review with flying colors. Finally, I generated the pictures; and to say that the results were a disappointment would be an understatement. Almost every picture was *very obviously* AI-generated, to the point of being unusable in a profile. (The carefully curated example photos made it look like they'd be photorealistic.) Even though I'm white, almost a third of the pictures depicted me as Asian. Only about a quarter of the total 80 were recognizably images of me. At the end of the day there were maybe 2 pictures that looked like me and were barely realistic-looking enough to maybe be usable. I understand that AI isn't deterministic and can make mistakes, and I wasn't expecting all 80 pictures to be perfect, or even good. But to have nearly all of them be unusable, and many of them showing me as the wrong race, is worse than I would have ever expected. I cannot recommend strongly enough avoiding this site.
Response from Datephotos.AISep 18, 2026
Hi Spencer — this one's on us, and your account checks out. We pulled the logs from your session: your first batch of uploads hit a real bug where our photo-analysis step silently failed to start. That's why 12 perfectly good photos got flagged as unusable until you deleted and re-uploaded them one by one, and the cryptic JSON error came from the same broken path. It's been reproduced and is now our top engineering priority. On the results: 2 usable photos out of 80 is not what you paid for, and the likeness problems you describe — including getting your ethnicity wrong — are a model failure we take seriously, not something we'll hide behind "AI isn't deterministic." We've refunded your order in full. If you're ever willing to give us another shot, write to [email protected] and we'll re-run your photos free once the fixes are live — no strings attached.