Photobox Easy Create™
Using AI to give our customers a helping hand
“Blank pages inspire me…with terror!”
We know how much our customers love to create Photo Books with their huge collections of photos. It’s often a labour of love, where careful consideration and time is taken to make the most personal, meaningful gift. But for some, that process can be pretty daunting. A little bit like staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page as you’re about to start writing a blog post, when we look at an empty book of blank pages waiting to be filled with photos, we can sometimes feel a bit anxious, even helpless. Where do I even start with this?
We realised that a lot of our customers felt that way — and other things were standing in their way too. Some people want to take time creating their book, but they just don’t have the time. People want to give beautiful, well-designed books as gifts, but sometimes struggle arranging the pages themselves. And our customers often want their books to tell a story — but have so many photos, they don’t know where to begin ordering them.
Can’t someone just do this for me!?
After being overwhelmed by the blank page when I started writing this post, I quickly realised that no, I couldn’t get someone else to write this for me. Not if I wanted it to be just as I liked.
But there were a whole host of online tools that could help me along the way if I were to need them, making the whole process a bit less intimidating. Online thesauruses, spell checkers and character counters have been essential tools for writing for a long time now, but in recent years, technology has advanced writing assistance even further. Services like Grammarly not only tell you where your spelling or grammar might be a bit off, but they provide genuinely useful sentence and paragraph suggestions based on tone, structure and context.
And it’s all powered by some impressive AI and machine learning capabilities.
Perhaps there was a way we could provide that sort of assistance for Photobox customers. Imagine if there were tools that halved the time it takes to create a book? Or suggested the best layouts for your pages based on what was in your photos? Or organised and ordered your photos before filling your book with them for you? It would be a complicated journey, but we realised that there was an opportunity for us to use machine learning and AI to really empower our customers, and help them when they needed it.
Last month, the AI in Editor team launched a brand new service to our customers — Photobox Easy Create™. It’s our way of giving that helping hand if customers are daunted by the sight of a blank page. They can choose Easy Create at the start of their creation journey, answer a few questions up front, and get a personalised first draft of their book filled with photos, ready for them to edit as they please. Sounds, er, ‘easy’ right?
Making creation ‘Easy’ — how we use AI to assist our customers
The key thing when designing and building Easy Create was making sure we were addressing genuine concerns customers were having during the creation process. We’d been hearing the same comments for some time, a few of which I mentioned earlier on:
- Time — “I’m so busy…it would be great if I could finish my Photo Book more quickly.”
- Photo Organisation — “I have so many wonderful photos…how can all the photos in my album tell a good story?”
- Layouts — “I need some inspiration…how can I make my pages look even better?”
So how can AI help? As you can imagine, there are a few layers of complexity behind the Easy Create journey, and the process was not without challenges.
Here’s what’s going on behind the scenes of our new feature at the moment…
Photo Selection
Easy Create is able to analyse customers’ images using our Photo Analysation technology. Through this, we’re able to identify the content of customers’ images, detect faces, and give photos an aesthetic score based on things like contrast of colours, depth of field, motion blur and symmetry. We’re certainly not ranking our customers’ images alongside other photos — that would be a bit unfair.
Instead, the ranking helps us select better shots among duplicates. If customers have taken many photos of the same shot, Easy Create will only use one of them for their final book to avoid repetition, and the analysis helps decide which ones to leave out. The Photo Analyser also helps us suggest images for the front cover of their book — this is coming soon, so keep your eyes peeled!
Our Photo Analyser is also completely secure — the results of the analysis are never shared, and the output is only ever seen by the customer in question. The choice of what to do with our suggestions is ultimately up to them.
Photo Distribution
When Easy Create puts customers’ photos in their book, it aims to help them tell a visual story with their images. It gathers the metadata from their photos and is able to order them chronologically by time and date taken, giving customers a visual timeline of their memories. It also keeps in mind the ‘rhythm’ of images in the book. For example — say a customer had uploaded an album of photos from the last month. And it’s been a busy month for them — a birthday party in the first week, and a holiday the week after. Easy Create is able to distribute those photos distinctly, keeping those events separate in the narrative. No one wants sand in their birthday cake.
Through the distribution of images, we’re also able to help the customer decide how many pages they want their book to have. We can make suggestions of a few photos per page, through to many per page, helping customers understand how this affects the page number (and price) of their book.
Page Layouts
If customers struggle with arranging their images on a page, Easy Create can help them out with AI generated layouts. Our service generates smart layouts, arranging images on a page based on their content, making sure faces don’t get cropped. And they’re dynamic too — when more photos are added, the layouts will adapt so that they fit the page, whether they’re portrait, landscape or panoramic shots. When their book is filled, customers can access even more layouts with the shuffle button. These smart layouts are generated instantly, giving customers even more variety and control in their creation process, fast.
But does AI know best?
At its best, Easy Create should empower our customers, helping them in areas where they need it, and making suggestions that are useful, not intrusive — or worse, creepy. In order to do that, we need to make sure we’re humble in our approach. Just because the AI believes an image is the best of the bunch, doesn’t mean the customer necessarily will, and we wanted to make sure we reflected that ethos throughout our feature. For example — rather than declaring ‘Here is the best image for your front cover!’ we’ll suggest several that the user can choose from, putting the decision in their hands. It’s up to them if they want to use one of our suggestions or not, and any decision they make can be undone if they want to change it.
We also keep ethical concerns at the front of our minds too. AI safety is an important part of our process — the technology is only as clever as the humans who are teaching it (at least for now!) which can cause plenty of problems. Ultimately, we don’t want to replace with artificial intelligence what can only be done with a human touch. Our customers’ memories and moments are too important to be left entirely up to a machine to decide what to do with them.
With that in mind, it’s important to remember that our customers are generally very creative people. They take a lot of care with their creations and like to be in control of the process — and we don’t want to take that away. We just want to help steer them in the right direction when they need it, and automate the more tedious tasks that get in the way of their creativity.
There’s more to come…
Easy Create is our first dip into the ocean of machine learning. We’re hardly the first team to try to solve customer problems with AI, and we have a long way to go with what we want to achieve. But no matter what our ambitions are technologically, the most important thing to remember is the people we’re trying to help. To paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park — just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. We need to make sure we’re solving genuine customer problems with our technology!
Making a Photo Book shouldn’t be a chore, it should be a pleasure — and, when done right, smart technology can help to make it that way.
Look out for more AI powered features coming to Photobox in the future!
