G.F Smith, Taopix partner offer AI-powered album design platform
G.F Smith announced their strategic partnership with Taopix to introduce their AI-powered album design platform. G.F Smith was founded in 1885 by George Frederick Smith who along with his son shared a passion for paper. 100 years later, the company established G.F Smith Photographic in order to create handmade, exquisite albums.
“Our search for a solution that would significantly decrease the amount of time it takes to design an album started at the end of 2017,” says Gareth Sheekey, Photographic Director of G.F Smith. “We know that many of our clients, who are predominantly professional photographers, enjoy the art of designing a wedding album or photo book from scratch, however for others, the length of time taken from concept to completion is too long for them and ultimately results in no album being supplied. It could take months to design an album, a lot of thought and planning goes into the creation – the picture selection, editing and finally designing an album that tells a meaningful story are all factors that contribute to the lengthy timelines. At G.F Smith we believe in the fundamental value of the printed piece,” continues Sheekey.
“Print is the way to maintain your memories for generations to come. In a digital age that has seen numerous image holding formats already come and go, print remains the key to ensuring those memories are available and can be cherished forever. We believe books are the best way to showcase your memories and that AI technology can allow us to encourage even more people to design and print books to keep their memories safe for generations to come.”
When asked why G.F Smith decided to choose Taopix as their solution, Sheekey answers that it was exactly what they were looking for. G.F Smith is an existing client of Transeo Media, the sole distributor of Taopix software in the United Kingdom. “Taopix.ai checked each of the boxes, our client can import a folder of photos, and either design a book themselves or have the AI do the work for them,” concluded Sheekey.
“The Taopix.ai solution chooses the best pictures by doing a scoring analysis on the quality (a blended score of Face, Blur, Color Histograms and Saliency). It then continues to analyze similarities between images taken, choosing only the best quality images and completes the analysis with location and time clustering of the images before auto-flowing them into the design,” says Neil Bather, Managing Director of Transeo Media.
“Artificial Intelligence is the future for the medical and automotive industries among many others, why shouldn’t it be the future of photographic printing? We are excited about partnering up with G.F Smith in this ground-breaking leap and are proud to advise and assist them in every step of the journey,” concludes Bather.
G.F Smith will be showcasing the AI-powered prototype, at The Photography Show in Birmingham from 16-19 March 2019.