SNFaceCrop

The fun side of the Internet is heavily populated with so-called memes and cropped pictures to display funny moments or pop-culture references. Multiple online services let you easily adjust or alter pictures in this regard, but desktop applications like SNFaceCrop also come in handy. Just as the name suggests, it gives you the possibility to just cut out faces from any picture, with a built-in detection system.

A neat advantage is that the application is good to go from the moment you finish downloading it, which only takes a little while considering it comes in a light package. Other consequences of portability refer to your PC's health status and registries, which remain intact.

The main window is pretty simple in terms of design, with a large preview area for your picture, a list that displays all detected items, as well as an option to copy a specific one to your clipboard. Sadly, you need to use the open dialog to import pictures, because drag and drop is not implemented. Formats you can add only count as three, namely JPG, PNG and BMP.

There aren't any navigation, zooming or editing options so the only thing left is start the detection process. A prompt message lets you know how many faces are found, with them displayed in a list with icons and a preview area to view it in a larger panel.

A few options are at your disposal in order to specify whether to show faces in an oval or rectangle. What's more, you can use a built-in in tool to extend the detection area, but it would have been a lot more useful to be able to reduce it as well.

It's all fun and games until the process is over, at which point disappointment starts to kick in because of a few reasons. For starters, cropping is done in two fixed shapes that also include some of the background. This requires the use of other applications for post-processing. Second, detection isn't really high-tech, with tilted faces not properly picked or not at all, and sometimes objects that don't even resemble anything human being targeted for detection.

Bottom line is that SNFaceCrop comes with good intentions, but the system its whole functionality stands on isn't as solid as expected. What's more, you need to use special parameters to enable batch processing, which further cuts off practicality. The only thing the application manages to do is demonstrate that face detection technology exists.