Old photos of Málaga team up with AI: "It's an app with a design similar to TikTok"

A few days ago, Alejandro García Peláez was featured in SUR as one of the brilliant minds from the University of Malaga working in the 'basement'... of Google's Bernardo Quintero. Today, he returns to this newspaper for Panoruma, the application he created that has made artificial intelligence a great ally with historical photographs of Malaga. With just one word, this tool displays a list of images that descriptively relate to it: "You type 'Victoria' and what comes up are photos of the beer or advertisements," Alejandro García Peláez detailed this Wednesday during the presentation of the application at the Ateneo de Malaga with the debate 'Artificial Intelligence and Photographic Archives. A Step in Collaborative Documentation'.

The idea for Panoruma originated from Alejandro García Peláez's final degree project, a Computer Engineering student at UMA. "I have always been a lover of historical photographs of Malaga and with the 'boom' of artificial intelligence, I thought we could give a new dimension to the university's CTI archive. This application has similarities with the design of some well-known and widely used ones like 'TikTok'; although we are still in the first design and have a lot to advance," explained the young creator.

The application can be used both on mobile and web by typing 'Panoruma' into Google, and currently it has 32,000 photographs from the CTI, "I keep adding more as time goes by because many concessions are needed," pointed out Alejandro García Peláez. Just for that, according to the speakers, the roundtable that took place after the creator's presentation was set up. Participating were the project author himself along with the UMA professor of artificial intelligence Francisco Vico; the president of the Ateneo, Victoria Abón, and the president of the Photography Center in Malaga, Javier Ramírez.

Professor Francisco Vico, who has worked closely with Alejandro, expressed pride in this tool developed by a student: "This is just a first demonstration of what artificial intelligence is capable of doing. It can add value to many aspects of the city as is the case with the photographic archive of the CTI of the University of Malaga. The most important thing about this project is that it is useful and remains in the memory of all who use it. Alejandro, its creator, is one of those advanced students that I usually have every ten years," he added. Victoria Abón also described this meeting as "a special edition" of the monthly photography meetings.

Necessary for Malaga

All participants in this debate on artificial intelligence agreed on the same thing: the involvement of other city institutions, in addition to the University of Malaga, is necessary to continue thriving and adding value to Panoruma. "We should think about where the servers that collect documentary funds are, whether right here in the Ateneo or even in private funds that remain in the hands of their owners. It is a necessary collaboration," contributed one of the attendees at this meeting, with whom Alejandro García interacted, resolving doubts and curiosities about the application, which many began to try with their mobiles right at this presentation. "The Photography Center of Malaga wants to seriously propose a collaboration, that's why we are here today. Our next general assembly will have this as the main topic," assured the president Javier Ramírez.

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As reiterated by its creator on several occasions, this application is underway but still in an early phase. The service vocation of this application, along with Alejandro's ambition, goes further: "We are working on improving the search and even on applying artificial intelligence to historical books of Malaga so that it can tag the images and describe them in an even more useful way," the author noted, who before finishing did not want to forget to thank: "Thanks to the help of Bernardo Quintero, I have been able to access the resources of Gemini, the artificial intelligence with which I work, to be able to classify the images."