From its origins with the Royal College of Art, Wagtail has always enjoyed strong support for managing and displaying images. An early feature was editorial control over an image's 'focal point'; this means you can specify which area of a photo is cropped around, for example when a listing page displays thumbnails of photos in different aspect ratios to the originals.





A couple of releases later we added feature detection, which identifies features (typically faces) in photos when they're first uploaded. For sites with large numbers of images this can be a useful shortcut for those editors who don't relish the mildly therapeutic task of drawing rectangles round focal points.



Finding faces is a clever trick, but the most recent work on image management in Wagtail would have felt like science fiction a few years ago. Martin Sandström - from Swedish agency Fröjd - released wagtail-alt-generator, which uses Microsoft's computer vision service to insert image descriptions and tags at the point of upload. Here's a rapid-fire screencast showing it in action: