With smartphone cameras now so advanced, most of us ditched our compact cameras long ago. The ease with which we can fire up a smartphone camera and take a snap means many of us are now taking a lot of photos. That’s all well and good, but unless you’re a stickler for photo management, you can quickly end up with masses of subpar images that take up a large chunk of your phone’s storage space.
With that in mind, Japanese camera giant Canon has come up with a new app for iOS designed to automatically whip your photo library into shape.
Photo Culling uses artificial intelligence to sort through all of the images on your iPhone before suggesting which ones you might want to delete. To separate the wheat from the chaff, Canon’s Computer Vision Artificial Intelligence Engine analyzes four key features of a photo: Sharpness, noise, emotions, and closed eyes. Images that fail to reach a threshold score that you set for each characteristic will be suggested as deletions, with the final decision made, of course, by you.
The app will also suggest deleting duplicate photos, leaving you with the best images from a set.
Photo Culling offers a number of additional features, including photo count and storage space information on the app’s home screen; dynamic albums based on events and dates, with the app automatically surfacing large albums to suggest you review its photos for possible deletion; and dark/light mode options.
“In today’s ever-changing and overwhelming world, where thousands of photos are captured and stored in a person’s smartphone, consumers need an expert, reliable, and intuitive photo tool to help them decide the best photos based on years of trusted knowledge and technology,” Canon USA’s Tatsuro Kano said in a release. “Canon’s new Photo Culling app is the answer and we are proud to see how the company’s computer vision technology within this app can assist consumers with finding and keeping their best photos of their fondest moments.”
The only bad news is that Photo Culling isn’t free, so to use it you’ll have to pay $3 per month or $15 per year. If your photo management skills are a mess and you’re iPhone’s storage space is fast filling up, Canon’s Photo Culling app (available here) offers a free three-day trial to help you decide if it’ll be money well spent.
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