Turn casual photos into professional headshots with AI
Details
- External ID
- 48987618
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Turn casual photos into professional headshots with AI
- Website domain
- portraify.app
- Launched
- July 21, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 7
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.3972520908004779
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
A while back I needed an ID photo for something urgent. The only way to get one was to find a photo studio, book a time, and wait around for it to be printed, and just one set cost about $13 (converted from my local currency). With how far AI has come, I felt like this should be easier and cheaper by now.So, I built Portraify. It turns 1–3 casual photos into professional headshots, and also does US passport photos and 1-inch / 2-inch ID photos.The thing I cared most about was likeness. A headshot or an ID photo is only useful if it actually looks like you, otherwise there's no point. So the AI is tuned to reproduce the real you, no beautifying, no de-aging. It also checks your input photos before generating (lighting, sharpness, face visibility), so you don't waste a generation on a photo that was never going to work.I know people care a lot about uploading their face to some random AI tool, so to be clear: input photos are processed in memory and discarded after generation. They're never persisted or used for training. Generated portraits are stored so you can re-download them.One thing to know before you try: it needs a signup (no card) and you get 3 free generations. Let me know if there's anything that could be improved, or anything that doesn't work well in real-world use.Happy to answer any questions.
Enrichment
- Theme
- AI avatar and portrait tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Content generation
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- ai headshot generator from casual photos
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a standard SaaS wrapper that uploads user photos to an image generation API (such as Replicate or Fal.ai) with payment processing and credit management.
Discussion
14 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Gemini (Google's AI can generate passport photos), USPS passport photo service, Photoshop for photo editing
Concerns raised: AI-generated/edited photos violate official passport photo guidelines, Government regulations will catch up and restrict AI use for official documents, Risk of passport application denial if using AI-touched photos, Niche market with limited demand, Thin LLM wrapper without clear value justification
Feature requests: Expand beyond professional headshots to other portrait scenarios (tourism, travel, social settings)
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 195 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #64 of 196 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 230 days after the earliest competitor.
- Professional-Headshot.ai · ph · 2026-09-27 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.61
- AI Photos of You · ph · 2026-09-20 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- still. · ph · 2026-09-22 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- AI Professional Headshot Generator · ph · 2026-09-25 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- Portraze · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- Realistic AI Headshots · ph · 2026-09-23 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- I thought merging two photos with AI would be a weekend project. Nope · hn · 2026-04-03 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- LookTake · hn · 2026-02-24 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.52
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a content generation tool for Government yet.