I got stuck having to sift through hundreds of photos to select those which I thought best. I needed a tool which could help me automate the task of comparing photos to one another.
I had found a candidate, Ranker, but:
- The tool is built on top of GTKmm, which crippled my Windows system upon installation;
- The tool crashed when I tried to import images into it.
ImageRanker is built on .NET 4.5.2.
ImageRanker is as lean as I could make it:
- Open/Save text-based ranking files: these files are simply lists of absolute image pathnames, ordered by rank (highest rank first).
- Add/Remove/Clear images from the list.
- Rank Images: You will be shown pairs of images until the ranking process is complete.
The main form is pretty self-explanatory, as every command is listed in the menus, along with their shortcuts.
Progress of the ranking process appears in the title bar: "Ranking Pair X of N".
Radio buttons below the image pair show possible outcomes of the ranking:
- Pick Both (initially selected): Both images are considered equivalent; not one image of the two registers a hit.
- Pick (either side): The image on the same side as the radio button is considered more valuable that on the other side, and registers a hit.
- Exclude (either side): The image on the same side as the radio button is excluded from further comparison. Note that this does not contitute a hit for the image on the other side.
Clicking the "Next" button validates the selected action.
I had started out using Quicksort and showing the pairs as they came up, but the human mind being what it is, I could not avoid inconsistent results.
So, basically:
- Each image is compared exactly once against every other ((n^2 + n) / 2 comparisons in total);
- Each image selected from a pair registers a hit, and the images get sorted by descending hit count.