Adoption photo checker
Pick or take a photo of a shelter dog or cat and get a checklist of things published studies linked to faster adoption, with plain tips to improve the shot.
Your photo never leaves your device. All checks run in your browser. Nothing is uploaded or stored. This is a checklist based on published studies, not a prediction of whether or when an animal will be adopted.
Choose a photo from your library or files, or take a new one.
On a computer you can also drag and drop a photo here.
Listing text helper
Paste the listing description to see which words a 2019 study of 70,733 dogs linked to shorter or longer stays.
What it checks
- Sharpness: edge-detail (Laplacian variance) score.
- Brightness: average brightness and share of near-black or blown-out pixels.
- Resolution and shape.
- Animal in frame: a free open-source detector (COCO-SSD on TensorFlow.js) finds dogs and cats and measures how much of the photo they fill and how centered they are.
- Kennel bars and setting: rough pattern and color checks, which can be wrong.
Limitations
- It can’t judge eye contact, expression or whether an animal looks friendly.
- The bar and outdoor checks are simple heuristics and can be fooled by stripes, green walls or blankets.
- The studies are mostly observational and mostly about dogs; results may not apply to every shelter or to cats.
Read the full summary: what helps animals get adopted faster.