Cropping images is a massive problem for social media. Here is a talk from 2013 by Christopher Chedeau a front end engineer at Facebook describing some of the problems with their image layout algorithms.[1]
Initially, they tried to solve the problem by getting users to tag people inside the image and then use location of the tags as parameters to crop. If someone is tagged in a photo, Facebook makes sure that person is always inside of the cropped version.
Here is the write up from Christopher's blog.[2]
Was Instagram only using square images at one time? That would have been a brilliant way to have solved this problem.
>Initially, they tried to solve the problem by getting users to tag people inside the image and then use location of the tags as parameters to crop. If someone is tagged in a photo, Facebook makes sure that person is always inside of the cropped version.
Do they still do this? A lot of the times people aren't tagged by where their face is, but just tagged off to the side or something. I feel like this wouldn't work in a lot of cases.
Now when I upload an image to Facebook it automatically uses facial recognition to tag my friends. In the video from 2013 he mentions they had already solved the problem using heuristics to find faces in images. Before that, circa 2012, they might have been relying on people to tag their photos.
Initially, they tried to solve the problem by getting users to tag people inside the image and then use location of the tags as parameters to crop. If someone is tagged in a photo, Facebook makes sure that person is always inside of the cropped version.
Here is the write up from Christopher's blog.[2]
Was Instagram only using square images at one time? That would have been a brilliant way to have solved this problem.
1. http://blog.vjeux.com/2014/image/image-layout-algorithms-htm...
2. http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/image/best-cropping-position.html