Cropping Tool

Mar 16 -- Users often submit poor photos and the most common shortfall is awful cropping.  Merav and Dave, creators of LookBetterOnline, have created a cropping tool to help dating sites automatically crop user submitted photos.  Nice.  Check it out at www.croppingtool.com.  Enter referral code 23994 to get a 10% price break.  - Mark Brooks

Comments

[Sam Moorcroft, ChristianCafe.com]

We built our own tool for this (like just about everything else we have). The problem with this business has been that you are forced to develop your own tools, as there have not been generic s/w solutions (until recently).

Mind you, when you build it yourself, you have complete control, it is customizable to whatever your want, and if your techs are on salary anyway...Once built, it costs nothing.

LookBetterOnline's solution is nice. Mind you, I am not sure that people only want head-shots. Many have other things in their photos that they want chosen (including their full body, as the case often is).

[David Evans]

There are at least a half-dozen providers of auto-screening and cropping tools suitable for dating sites. Here's one I've talked about in the past. http://www.soflexonline.com/dating.html

Another 10 or so Java and PHP scripts to do the same thing which are free.

I guess there are dating sites who would pay another company $500 a month to run a 25-line piece of code. Amazing.

[James J.]

Dave,

LookBetterOnline's cropping tool is not a simple script to help with manual cropping like those Java and PHP scripts are. It uses face recognition technology to find the face in most photos and automatically crop for a headshot. This saves a site owner time and money which is the justification for the higher cost.

[Merav Knafo]

RelaxedGuy (David Evans from Corante),

The link you provided is a dating site with no mention of either a process or utility for cropping photos, so I don’t know what you mean there.

You are right in that there are a number of utilities out there to assist webmasters and support personnel manage the annoying and costly problem of cropping and sizing photos. It is a labor-intensive and bothersome thing to have to do, gobbling up resources and time. Most sites of any size use one or another of the variants of these semi-automated processes or utilities. Most are quite basic in their functionality, and it wouldn’t surprise me if you could find one out there that was 25 lines of code long, such as a masking frame of some kind.

The CroppingTool was designed, like most software is, to add efficiency and to provide cost savings to awkward, kludgey and expensive processes precisely like those currently used to crop photos by dating sites. Some sites spend thousands of dollars per month cropping photos – money that could more wisely be spent buying traffic. And because the cropping processes in use are slow, users often wait 24 to 72 hours to have their photos approved. We can shorten that cycle time and save the site money. Our costs are pennies on the dollar over all other cropping and sizing processes. But you can’t do that with a program 25 lines long…

Saying that we charge $500 for a program that is 25 lines long is like saying that a profile writer charges $100 to run a spell checker on the user’s profile text – utterly inaccurate, and if I may say so, quite wrong-headed. You obviously haven’t looked at our site or operated the CroppingTool demo.

Over a year in development, the CroppingTool is a face recognition application that uses advanced algorithms to detect the face in the uploaded user photo and crop it to the webmaster’s desired aspect ratio, automatically. Variables for pixel height and width are user definable. Our API supports most development environments. It integrates completely with the dating site application so there is little or no human intervention or interaction with the photos that are successfully cropped. The tool has an overall success rate just under 90% with images that contain a human face. There is no faster or cheaper way to crop photos and add a clean and consistent look to your dating web site.

Merav Knafo & Dave Coy
Founders
CroppingTool.com