Web Galleries

I had some high hopes recently that Facebook had some kind of cool Thumbnail Cropping intelligence in its galleries. In a previous article, Facebook came up with a crop wildly different yet every bit as cool as the photographer’s original. It got me to wondering if Facebook had some kind of face-detection system and cropping algorithm that made thumbnails of non-square, non-landscape images look good in the 4:3 thumbnail cell.

I decided to test it with some images from a recent infant shoot. I had a wonderful round pink face with very dark eyes against a blue background. The thought being that these would be easy to face-detect.

Boy was I wrong. The four images across the top all look like FB was doing some cool estimating in the thumbnail crop. Turns out it was just dumb luck (with two portrait and two landscape images). The poor little guy in the bottom row was cropped mercilessly. If any intelligent design exists in FB’s thumbnail cropping, it isn’t apparent here. Who would click on that last photo?

How does upstart Google+ fare?

The galleries display very differently in Google+ and they use a square fanned preview in the album mode. It helps a little but it doesn’t appear to be seeing the face. In the gallery display mode there was no cropping occurring. See the image below.

Admittedly more testing is needed but I think Face Recognition with intelligent cropping is a must for social media websites. After all who is going to click on a forehead with a beret?

Makes me wonder-what happens to a panorama…

While not a true Sharecropping article, it has that sharecropping feel to me. So, here goes!

Ever send an image, meticulously composed and cropped, of course, to a social media site like Facebook? Did you ever have that crop destroyed by the constraints of their web galleries’ thumbnail proportions? Ever have the opposite happen? Have you ever sent a great image to an online gallery and had the thumbnail crop give you a different and sometimes more compelling image? It happens.

I was thumbing through some images on a FB Friend’s profile pictures gallery and noticed this compelling image (4th down on the left) and thought that is a cool composition. Of all the images shown, its thumbnail representation grabbed me the most. I thought, good ol’ Tom must have cropped this one 4:3 for it to come out that good in thumbnail view. I was wrong.

This is the actual cropping Tom chose when he edited his photo. There is nothing wrong with it. In fact, it is a very nice image. Those killer eyes are placed at the upper right Rule of Thirds in the thumbnail crop and in the portrait original. But, I think you would agree, the thumbnail and the full image are two different pictures. Of course the cropist couldn’t resists cropping the larger version for demonstration purposes on this blog.

I’ve tried to approximate the crop of the 4:3 thumbnail in a larger version. It is quite a different picture than the original. It has fewer distractions in the bright white bar and less zebra print. It isn’t better but it is different. It is also something that might not have been attempted had not Facebook’s Profile Pictures gallery thumbnail cropping shown us the way. Drop us a note and let us know which version you like better.

Special thanks to Tom Frisch for allowing us use of his image. You can find Tom on Facebook here. He also has a gallery on SmugMug here.

Of course this all got me thinking about something else but that is a topic for another article.

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