67 START-UP ALLEY Frameright
so she teamed up with Järstä to work on a proposal to solve the problem. Their actions were validated further after they won the Uutisraivaaja media innovation challenge (which is sponsored by the biggest newspaper group in Finland), along with €125,000 prize money. The resulting tool, Frameright, is a browser-based application that enables the user to define multiple crops of the image and save them inside the metadata, so that one picture contains all the information on how it should be displayed across different media. Users can create a unique library to suit their needs, and Frameright also has a built-in library of common social media platforms. While Ekroos says the solution will use some AI to help crop the image sensibly, the ultimate control remains in the hands of the user: “Image cropping isn’t about having a face or a subject in the picture – it’s about composition and it’s about dynamics – that’s why it’s super important we have a manual tool with a human touch that will be complemented by AI.” Ekroos claims that Frameright – which can be used individually or integrated into a third-party CMS system – is the only tool that allows pictures to be cropped quickly in a non-destructive manner. ”You can also make multiple crops in Adobe
Photoshop,” she adds, “but that can take more time.” To cultivate more connections with potential EU-based publishing and e-retailer clients, and to find more funding, the firm headed to Germany, where they hooked up with the Hamburg-based Next Media Accelerator. There, they piloted the application with Spiegel Tech Lab, a subsidiary of the publishing group. Further down the line, the firm hopes to offer a similar tool for video companies so that it can create thumbnails, promotional material and video clips for social media. “That’s on our roadmap, as we can apply the same technology to make that happen,” Ekroos says.
Further funding has come in the form of €25,000 from Next Media Accelerator, and the firm is in the process of raising its first pre-seed round to finalise its first sales and get the product to seed stage. At the moment, Frameright is a B2B operation, but Ekroos hopes that once social media channels see its benefits, they may integrate it into their systems, so the tool will operate on a consumer level. The ultimate goal is to see Frameright become a part of all images that are published digitally. “As a visual person, I want to make sure the visual culture we’re heading towards is good, that we have the possibility to create beautiful things in the online space,” she says.
PHOTO RECOVERY Frameright enables users to non- destructively crop images in multiple ways and save them
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