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/.

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!

It loves this image (9.4):

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/BRINmnczQ-yY7wLn0xbaYA

but says that The background really adds something special. The background is... full black?

And it hates this image (4.7):

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/nWu-YSRgSrWWfwxUgUorcQ

and gives it a "good timing" of 35%. The timing is what makes this photograph ;-)

Also, while direct links work, the back button doesn't seem to update the content of the page?

Fun how it saw the good timing but put such a low score. Keegan is tough with low-light photos overall. Gotta improve that!

What's your browser? (re: back button problem)

Chrome 53.0.2785.143 m on Win7 64bits (with Ublock Origin).

Thanks, gotta investigate :)

Indeed, it does not like my 4x5s, but it does like some anime figure pictures I took with my cell phone.

I think it basically looks to see if something is in focus, and you know the "rule of thirds", which it must have learned from custom-cropped photos uploaded to 500px.

Thanks for the link. I love these.

wow, thanks for the link! those are really nice photographs, beautifully framed and very artistic (for pure art - that woman leaning on a wall, with the triangular shadow across the building, come on - wow!) and obviously even more informative to us 66 years later than when they were made - that is true art, wow.

one quick question - the page you linked starts with a top picture and then a set, by "the second picture of this fantastic set" did you mean the second picture on the page (gondolier in dark canal with tight ray of light from above) or second in the "set" (guy crossing tracks running with empty rickshaw)

I've emailed them to mention that low lit photos seem to score much lower than they should, and they plan to look into improving that.

On top of that, it hates post-sunset landscape.

Here I played with colors and color temp on a post-sunset landscape, and the resulting image, while really not great --in fact, plain weird-- is rated 9.3

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/04t9ZlbZRDqbc2mPx-4CvA

Does the system have a notion of how sure it is of the rating it gives? [Edit: should it say "without a doubt"? There should be some doubt.]

(Also, is it deterministic (same image always get the same rating); it sure appears to be and it's certainly what people expect of a bot, but that's not how humans rate things...)

To be honest, I kinda like the image. It might not be great to you but it has a nice spooky fantasy air to it to me. As to wether it should be considered a good picture, I have no idea.