Sharing learnings about our image cropping algorithm
Image cropping algorithms are hard.  When we made our first one for reddit, it used this algorithm:<p>Find the larger dimension of the image.  Remove either the first or last row/column of pixels, based on which had less entropy.  Keep repeating until the image was a square.<p>The most notable "bias" of this algorithm was the male gaze problem identified in the article.  Women's breasts tended to have more entropy than their face, so the algorithm focused on that since it was optimized for entropy.  To solve the problem, we added software that allowed the user to choose their thumbnail, but not a lot of users used it or even realized they could.<p>I assume they've since upgraded it to use more AI with actual face detection and so on, but at the time, doing face detection on every image was computational infeasible.