Monument Mode could make holiday snaps ruined by tourists a thing of the past

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Crowds often make it impossible to take a good picture at tourist hot-spots
New software solves the problem by removing moving objects from photos
The result is a clean shot of just the subject and the monument

Published: 08:34 EST, 20 October 2015 | Updated: 08:38 EST, 20 October 2015

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Everyone wants to head home with the perfect collection of holiday pictures, but more often than not that is impossible.

Places such as the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tour get millions of visitors every year, making them some of the busiest spots in the world.

So, unless you are willing to wake up at 3am, the likelihood is that any picture taken at a famous monument will also have a large number of tourists milling about in the background.

Having your holiday pictures ruined by fellow tourists at popular attractions like the Taj Mahal (pictured) could soon be a thing of the past. Adobe has invented a new piece of software that removes moving items from a picture

But a new piece of technology promises to make these problems a thing of the past.

'Monument Mode' is a new software development that uses an algorithm to distinguish moving objects from fixed ones.

To make it work, a camera in Monument Mode is pointed at a landmark, even in a busy street, for a short period of time to record several seconds of footage from a fixed point.

The technology then analyses the live camera feed and removes the moving objects, giving a clean shot of just the subject and the monument.

Soon, cameras could be smart enough to remove unwanted images from pictures

This enables the average person to remove pesky cars and tourists from their images in a similar way to professional photographers, who have been able to do this using Photoshop for years.

Monument Mode was demonstrated by Adobe at the company's Max Creativity Conference earlier this month.

The product isn't yet available to buy but it is expected to be a big hit as a mobile phone app, although some people have raised concerns about how effective it would be at many tourist attractions where visitors are often stationary when taking in a view.