Revolutionary new “lens-free camera” created in a garage by a crazy inventor—now all your vacation photos will be PERFECT!

Background:

When people go on vacation, 99% of their pictures are of sunsets and monuments that have been photographed thousands of times before.

Sure, that image of a majestic tropical bird perched in front of a waterfall may seem like one-in-a-million shot, but that still means that one hundred variants of it have already been uploaded to Google Photos.

The issue:

It can be a lot of work to frame a shot in an aesthetically-pleasing fashion. But what if we could make use of THE INTERNET to save us the trouble?

Proposal:

Instead of carrying a regular camera, a user can carry a “camera” without a lens or ability to take pictures.

Instead, when the user presses the shutter button:

The “camera” records the user’s GPS coordinates, the time of day, and the current orientation of the camera.
Later, the “camera” syncs this information to the Internet and downloads the most aesthetically-pleasing photo for the specified site and time of day.

So if you were disappointed that you were taking photos of Niagara Falls while it was overcast, no worries: the camera will pick out some majestic waterfall-and-rainbows-on-a-sunny-day photos from online.

take-a-photo — ***Fig. 1:*** This “lens free” camera looks like a traditional camera, except it doesn’t actually take pictures—it only records your GPS location and orientation when taking the picture. (The viewfinder shown here could just be a transparent plastic window, not a real LCD screen.)

it-actually-searches-online — ***Fig. 2:*** *Internally, the camera is really just searching for the top-rated image at a given set of coordinate / orientation / time-of-day.*

Conclusion:

Stop futzing with shutter speed, exposure, framing, and who knows what else—just let the Internet take your photos for you!

PROS: Saves tons of time! Makes everyone into a master photographer. You won’t have to worry about looking bad in a photo, because you’ll never be in a photo! (Unless you happen to be the subject of the top-rated photo somehow.)

CONS: At least one person will still have to use a real camera to take photos, or else there won’t be anything for the GPS-only camera to find.