You shoot and Croppola composes

We envy photographers who are experts at composing beautiful pictures and would like to achieve the same result. Croppola is a user-friendly online tool that helps photo-lovers to make the most of their pictures.

Croppola's motto is: "You shoot, we compose." Its algorithms analyze the content of images and provide an automatic suggestion for a crop that could be a professional’s choice. The online program computes various features; and faces – if any – are detected. Using this information, a search is done through all possible crops and the one that is most in harmony and balance in terms of contrast and colors is suggested.

This brand new tool is the brainchild of Radhakrishna Achanta and Appu Shaji, both PhDs in the field of Computer Vision. They collaborate with the Image and Visual Representation Group (IVRG), directed by Professor Sabine Süsstrunk at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL.

Everything started in September 2011 when they received the MICS Spin Fund to work on their idea. A few days after Croppola went online, the creators attended The Next Web (TNW) conference in Amsterdam. TNW released an article on Croppola, full of praise for this novel invention. Soon afterwards, www.croppola.com became an instant hit and received highly encouraging reviews from all over the world.

“The name Croppola is not just derived from "crop", but is also a tribute to Francis Ford Coppola, renowned filmmaker,” explain Radhakrishna Achanta and Appu Shaji.

After just two days, Croppola had already won over 6,000 users. “This is certainly more than what we expected and it has reinforced our confidence in the product”. The creators are now targeting application programming interfaces (API) and mobile applications markets.