Using face detection to automatically give you better thumbnails

Cropped thumbnail images are used in many areas of DPHOTO, particularly on mobile devices where space is constrained. These thumbnails have always been cropped using a standard method that assumes the center of the image is most important. This assumption is true most of the time, but not always—it can sometimes leave people awkwardly cropped out of the image.

This is a problem that has annoyed us for a long time. We did consider building a feature that would allow users to manually set the focus point for each image, but that solution sounded incredibly tedious and repetitive. Surely there is a better way... surely computers are smart enough to crop photos for us?

It turns out they are. Using face detection, we can now intelligently crop your photos to ensure that nobody loses their head. This results is better, more informative thumbnails, and more attractive album covers. And the best part is that you don’t need to do anything—just upload a photo, and you automatically get perfect thumbnails.

Before and After

For those people concerned about privacy, rest assured that no personal data is involved. Although they sound similar, Face Detection is very different from Face Recognition. Detection simply gets the position of faces in an image, whereas Recognition attempts the more complex task of determining who the face is. If we ever add features with privacy implications, then those features will be opt-in.

This feature is enabled now for all users with a Standard or Premium account.