Three numbers appear across this site: how many photos SmileCrop handles without intervention, how many it flags for review, and how long the flagged ones take to finish. Here is the whole procedure, the results, and what this measurement cannot tell you.
Measured August 2026 in the author's own clinic. Ten photos and 456 photos, one person.
One ordinary batch from the clinic: 524 files off the card, of which 68 were QR name-tag shots (one per patient, used to split the photos into folders) and 456 were clinical photographs. Those went through SmileCrop in a single batch on normal settings.
| Outcome | Photos | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Saved without intervention | 423 | 92.8% |
| Flagged for review | 33 | 7.2% |
| Total processed | 456 | 100% |
We round that to 93% elsewhere on the site. It is not a measure of crop accuracy. It means the software was confident enough to save the photo.
This is the number that matters: flagged photos are the only manual work left for a person. We took ten photos SmileCrop actually flagged in that batch — its own worst cases, some of which needed the name corrected too — and processed them twice.
| Method | Time | Per photo |
|---|---|---|
| Bulk editor in SmileCrop — crop, rename and file | 1:32 | 9.2 s |
| By hand in another program — total | 5:33 | 33.3 s |
| — of which cropping | 4:47 | 28.7 s |
| — of which renaming and filing into patient folders | 0:46 | 4.6 s |
SmileCrop took 27.6% of the manual time. Count only the cropping on the manual side and it is 4:47 against 1:32, or 32%.
This number is arithmetic, not a measurement. Nobody timed 456 photos cropped by hand against the 33 flagged ones from the same pile — that would be three hours of work for the sake of one figure on a website. Two things were measured: how the batch split (423 / 33), and two timed runs over ten photos. The rest is multiplication:
| Handling 456 photos | Hands-on time |
|---|---|
| All by hand — 456 × 23.7 s | 3 h 0 min |
| With SmileCrop — only the 33 flagged × 9.2 s | 5 min 4 s |
| Manual work remaining | 2.8% |
Hence 97% less manual work (97.2% precisely; on a richer manual baseline it reaches 98%, which is why we quote the lower figure). Two things to see in that calculation:
Deliberately. How long a batch takes depends on the computer: an older office machine behaves differently from one with a fast graphics card. Counting that time would measure the hardware rather than the work, and the figure would stop applying to anyone with a different computer.
More to the point, nobody sits and watches it. You put the card in, start the run and go and do something else — leave it overnight if you like and deal with the flagged photos in the morning. Time you do not spend at the screen is not your time. Every figure on this page is therefore hands-on human time, and nothing else.
The calculator assumes 7.2% of your photos will be flagged, and that a flagged photo costs you 28% of your manual time. That 28% is costed against your time for an ordinary photo, even though flagged ones tend to be the more awkward kind — so the result understates rather than overstates.
Listed here so they do not have to be looked for.
Which is why SmileCrop comes with 14 days free. The trial lets each clinic measure its own review rate on its own photos.