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Comment by p4bl0 | Hacker News Reader

I think the fact that the AI is developed by Regaind (https://regaind.io/) must be taken into account. Their service is not intended for artsy pictures. It is rather targeted at people who have 1000 photos on their reflex from their last vacations and want to make a relevant and beautiful album of 50 photos to remember their trip, but don't want to spend two weeks comparing and selecting the right ones.

See for instance their demo here : https://regaind.io/demo/.

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Exactly =) The target is not professional photographers but pretty much everyone else taking pictures everyday with their smartphones. Artsy photos are more often than not wonderful for reasons which are not way too semantic for us for now - situations, etc, and which are way beyond what standard photographers do!

In my experience, even amongst vacation snapshots, the best tend to be of the accidentally artsy variety. I suppose this algorithm would completely fail to recognize the hilarity of the mirroring sphere of a tourist's perfectly bowling-ball-bald head in front of an apse, hovering under the blob of light that is the eye of the pantheon dome on a phone snap. I know I did, (miss it) on the first few times I scrolled through the series.

Generally I feel tempted to file this site under fun with phrase generators, with some ML thrown in to make it slightly more interesting than purely random phrase generator toys. But are there really no use cases for automated checks of aesthetic conventions? Sifting through the data dump of a full day of wedding shots maybe? I know I would be tempted to start with a computer generated shortlist. Mate it with face detection so that you can cluster by subset of attendees (each combination of faces captured must be present at least once in the final set) and... well I guess they already use systems like that, it's 2016.

An entirely unrelated idea in the general area of photography, algorithms and human learning that I still miss is this: an option in manual mode that takes a full auto shot right after the manual one, exposing how good or bad the algorithms are vs the operator. Or do some cameras have something like that? Do manufacturers omit it to not expose deficiencies in their algorithms? Do they omit it to not hurt the feelings of customers when they are worse than auto mode?

This is indeed a "fun" project which showcases the technology and provides (I think) fairly relevant comments (trust me - a random generator is much worse, we had terrible comments at the beginning of the project). The other technology modules you describe (face recognition etc) are indeed requirements for a semi or fully automated curation system.

That's actually a really great idea! Gonna have to check this out more.

That demo is pretty impressive. Removes duplicates, and you get a pretty good result going down to the top 25. Nice stuff.

Thanks!

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