A few months ago I had a group photo from a trip where one friend was missing — she'd left early. I opened Photoshop, spent 20 minutes fighting selection masks, and gave up. The result looked terrible.
I figured: this is a problem with a clear solution. Someone should make it easy.
Validating before building
Before writing a line of code, I went looking for evidence that other people hit this wall too.
It didn't take long. Reddit threads, Quora questions, random Facebook groups — people asking how to add a family member who missed the reunion, how to combine two decent shots into one, how to put their kid next to a theme park character without actually going. Common, everyday problems that Photoshop technically solves but realistically doesn't — not for people without the time or skill to learn it.
That felt like enough signal to start.
What the product does
aiimagecombiner.app lets you upload 2–5 photos, add an optional text prompt to guide the composition, and get back a single blended image. No masking, no layers, no manual color matching.
The use cases that keep coming up:
- Adding someone who wasn't in a group photo
- Combining product photos without a studio
- Before/after comparisons with matched tones
- Putting a subject into a different background scene
The hardest part
Getting the blend to look natural. Naively stitching images together fails immediately — the lighting is always slightly off, proportions don't match, edges are obvious. The prompt-guided generation approach helped a lot here, letting the model reinterpret the whole scene rather than just paste things together.
Built on Next.js + Cloudflare Workers, moved fast with Claude Code.
What I'd tell myself before starting
The positioning language matters more than I expected. Users aren't searching for "AI image compositing" — they're searching for "how do I put two photos together." Getting that framing right took longer than it should have.
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