How AI Chooses Photos and Album Layouts

What the AI actually measures

Before a single frame is placed, the photos chosen for the album are analysed. The analysis runs in the browser on the booking's photos, and it looks at properties that can be measured objectively — not at whether a moment is meaningful. Those measurements become the raw material for every decision that follows.

• Sharpness: whether the subject is genuinely in focus, which separates a usable hero from a soft frame.
• Exposure: blown highlights and crushed shadows, which decide how a photo will print.
• Faces: where faces are and how clear they are, which drives cropping and frame sizing.
• Orientation and aspect: portrait frames belong in tall slots, landscapes in wide ones.
• Near-duplicates: bursts of the same moment, so only one copy competes for a place.
• Colour: used to sample a background that belongs to the wedding's own palette.

Choosing the hero

In Smart Photo Selection's AI Album Generator, each sheet gets one dominant photo — sharp, well exposed, with clear faces — and the rest are sized by importance around it. This is why generated spreads rarely look like even grids: hierarchy is the first rule. A sheet with a strong portrait and three supporting frames reads faster than the same four photos at equal size, and it mirrors how an experienced designer works.

Building the sheet around the hero

Orientation is matched as the sheet is built: portrait photographs go into tall frames, landscapes into wide ones, and crops always preserve the frame's ratio rather than stretching the photo. Detected faces stay inside the crop and away from the frame edges, so a supporting slot does not cut the subject off — pan or zoom inside any crop to check. Supporting and detail photos then fill the remaining space by importance, and layered or exposure blends are used where a quieter transition helps, most often on opening sheets and chapter breaks. Backgrounds are sampled from the photos' own colours, so a marigold-heavy haldi and an evening reception can look different without being redesigned. Double exposure ideas cover which frames pair well.

Variety, fold and resolution

• Variety: consecutive sheets do not repeat the same arrangement, so a 20-spread album does not read as one template twenty times.
• Fold safety: photos and text stay clear of the centre fold, with a 0.125 in fold-safe zone on each side.
• Resolution: each photo's effective ppi at its printed size is calculated, and anything under 200 ppi is flagged before you export.
• Photo count: you set how many photos each sheet holds, or let the generator decide — select 8 photos for a sequence and an 8-photo template takes exactly those eight, one per slot, in order, with no repeats.

What the AI does not measure

Which moment mattered, which expression the couple will frame, and the cultural order of a wedding's events are not visible in the data. The generator will place a technically perfect photo of the décor beside a slightly softer photo of the vows without hesitating. Reorder sheets, swap heroes and add the quiet frames yourself — the AI wedding album design guide sets out the division of labour. The same analysis runs before generation, scoring sharpness, exposure, faces and duplicates to propose a shortlist from your selection, which you can add to or trim before the layout is built; see AI photo selection for that side of the scoring.

When you disagree with a result

1. Swap the photo on the frame directly — usually the fastest fix.
2. Adjust the crop if the placement was right but the framing is not.
3. Regenerate that sheet: regeneration uses a new seed, so you get a genuinely different composition, not the same layout shuffled.
4. Change the photos per sheet if the count itself is wrong for the sequence.
5. Open the sheet in the album editor when you want control beyond swaps and crops.