Smart Crop for Photo Prints and Photo Gifts: Framed Right, One
Nobody wants to order the print where Grandma is missing everything above the nose. Until now, avoiding it meant cropping by hand, and some customers never brought their order to completion. Now we have auto-cropping: with Smart Crop, one tap centers the crop on the faces in the photo, built right into your Online Photo Solution.
Why Smart Crop helps you sell more
Smart Crop launched in Photo Printswithin the past couple of weeks, and it's live in Photo Gifts too,for all Online Photo Solution customers. It replaces the old centercrop with one that finds the faces in a photo and centers the crop onthem. If it can't find a face, it falls back to a standard centercrop, so nothing breaks.
Here's what it does for your customers and for your store:
For your customers
- Less friction. Tap Smart Crop and the crop lands on the faces. No dragging, no zooming, no second-guessing.
- Better on a phone. Cropping with a thumb is fiddly. One tap isn't.
- Faster big orders. 40-photo order shouldn't feel like 40 small chores.
- Every print size. From 4x6 to 11x14 and beyond, faces land where they belong, even when the camera's ratio doesn't match the paper.
- Beyond prints. In Photo Gifts, products like photo books, calendars and canvas wraps get the same face-first crop.
For your store
- More finished orders. In our experience, an easier process leads to more customers reaching "Place order." Customers who breeze through a big order are more likely to reach the end of it.
- Fewer awkward moments at the counter. Sensible crops mean fewer "why is my photo cut off?" conversations.
- Added value, built in. Smart Crop is part of your Online Photo Solution, another step in our ongoing investment in helping you turn more of your customers' photos into orders.
How Smart Crop works behind the scenes
Here's what happens when a customer taps Smart Crop. A face-detection model scans the photo, finds the faces, and positions the crop box so they sit at the center of the print size or product the customer chose. If it can't find a face, it falls back to a standard center crop, so the worst case is what customers had before. It looks at faces only, with no read on the surroundings.
The detection runs right in the customer's browser, on their computer or phone, so there is no waiting on a server. The trade-off is model size: a bigger model detects better but takes longer to download and uses more data. Our team is balancing those, and a stronger model can be swapped in later without changing how the feature works.
Smart Crop works best when faces arevisible, and we're continuing to refine it, including how it handlesgroup photos.
What's next
More is on the way. We're alsoexperimenting with an AI assistant that helps customers buildprojects such as photo books, calendars and more so stay tuned!
See it for yourself
Try Smart Crop with your own photos.We hope to have a short demo ready before this post goes live [demolink to come]. If you're not yet a dakis customer, reach out and giveit a try