Developer built an app for cursed photos using a 2007 algorithm and attracted millions of views

A developer going by measure_plan showed off a content-aware scaling tool built, in his own words, for "cursed photo editing."

A post featuring warped portraits spread across social media, and beta access requests flooded in for the enthusiast. The app currently runs on iPhone.

The tool relies on seam carving, also known as the seam method. The algorithm scans an image for chains of pixels with the least visual significance and either removes or duplicates them, which changes the frame proportions without stretching everything evenly. Important areas stay untouched while backgrounds and uniform regions compress or expand.

Computer vision models handle the job of identifying those important areas. The developer used Apple Vision framework alongside RF-DETR from Roboflow to detect people, objects, and key zones in a photo. All processing happens locally on the device itself, with no images sent to a server.

The desktop version of the tool reveals the full set of parameters:

• width and height sliders as percentages of the original, plus eight aspect ratio presets ranging from 1:1 to 21:9

• eight shapes for fitting the frame into, including circle, triangle, diamond, octagon, star, and heart

• a content-aware slider from 0 to 100 percent, where zero gives regular stretching and 100 delivers full seam carving

• a forward energy mode for cleaner seams and protection for skin tones

• tools for protecting areas, removing objects, and erasing

A separate parameter controls how the image fits into a shape. At maximum, each row of pixels compresses along the outline, so the subject gets pulled inward to match the shape instead of being cropped, while at zero the frame simply gets cut off at the boundary. Export goes to PNG with transparency preserved.

Analysis quality gets chosen separately, since seams get calculated on a downscaled copy while export always uses the full-resolution original. Higher settings noticeably increase processing time.

New features keep piling on fast. The developer already added a mode that turns any photo into an arbitrary shape, giving it a joke name after a soccer player, and collage building showed up right after.

The algorithm itself is nothing new. Shai Avidan from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories and Ariel Shamir from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya introduced seam carving back in 2007 at SIGGRAPH. Adobe picked up a non-exclusive license and built the method into Photoshop CS4 under the name Content Aware Scaling, after which it made its way into GIMP, digiKam, and ImageMagick.

The developer already submitted an App Store application. There's no Android version yet, and he only sees that happening down the road, while beta invites currently go out through personal direct messages.