66 START-UP ALLEY Frameright
Words by Ann-Marie Corvin
In this month’s Start-up Alley, we look at a visual search engine used by Facebook and Interpol,an emotional response engine and an image cropping solution
FRAMERIGHT
COUNTRY: FINLAND STARTED: 2017
Finnish firm Frameright was born of out pure frustration. Photographer Marina Ekroos and IT consultant llkka Järstä were baffled that no one was addressing the issue of perfectly good photos destroyed by automated crop fails. Analysing the visual content of high-profile online newspapers for her Masters in Visual Journalism at Finland’s University of Tampere, Ekroos repeatedly encountered oversized headshots, thumbnails of someone’s chest and little else, or just really bad composition. She says: “Some of these sites were winning prizes for good design. And I’m like, what’s wrong here? They are really not taking care of the pictures.” From the website creation side, Ilkka Järstä explains that, while high-end designers produce these elaborate sites with a lot of bells and whistles, the problem kicks in when clients start to use them. “They get in a big mess with the pictures. Most CMS solutions have some kind of built-in cropping solution, but they tend to be quite inflexible, so even if publishers want to customise their imagery, it can often be hard to do so.” A couple of years after their initial death- by-cropping conversation, Ekroos was still aghast she had to spend so much time filling in metadata fields for cropping sizes for clients such as The Wall Street Journal –
FULL FRAME Ekroos (pictured right) and Järstä (left) were frustrated by automated crop fails
SOME OF THESE SITES WERE WINNING PRIZES FOR GOOD DESIGN. AND I’M LIKE,WHAT’SWRONGHERE?
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