Don’t measure the computer. Measure the work left for a person.
Processing speed is not the point when the software runs unattended. The number
worth watching is how many photos still come back to a person.
1,000
photos handled by hand
In an editor, a person must place, crop, straighten and check every image.
A thousand photos means a thousand trips through the manual workflow.
→
72
photos flagged for review
In the founder’s own clinic SmileCrop processed 456 photos in a single batch
and flagged 33 of them — 7.2%. For every 1,000, that puts roughly 72 in the review queue —
each already classified, cropped and rotated, ready for a human decision.
Reviewing flagged photos
A flagged photo is rarely work from scratch. The software has usually guessed the
type and drawn the box — it is simply below the confidence threshold. You review the suggestion,
adjust it where necessary, and save. Only a genuinely unrecognised photo needs more: you pick the
type from a list, the software sets the aspect ratio and rotates the shot, and you
adjust the crop and the angle.
We timed exactly that case: ten photos SmileCrop actually flagged
out of the 456-photo batch. Not a demo on photos that suited it — these are its
own worst cases, and some needed the name corrected as well. We processed the same
ten twice: once by hand in another program, once in SmileCrop's bulk editor.
5:33
10 flagged photos by hand elsewhere
Cropping alone 4:47, renaming and filing into patient
folders 0:46. The whole way from photo to folder.
→
1:32
the same 10 in SmileCrop's bulk editor
Cropping, renaming and filing together. About 28% of the time
— and even counting only the cropping on the manual side, it is 4:47 against 1:32.
Being straight about the measurement: the manual filing had it easy. There was no
tree of hundreds of existing folders to hunt through and no new folder had to be
created — in a real archive that 0:46 would be longer. Flagged photos are also
the awkward ones by definition, so cropping them by hand takes longer than an
ordinary shot too (hence 5:33 for ten, where a routine series came out at 24 s a
photo). Ten photos, one person, one sitting — treat it as a demonstration, not a study.
The full procedure and its weak spots.
i
What the 7.2% means: the 7.2% is a flag rate observed
in one clinic on one batch of 456 photos, not a measurement of crop accuracy. The unflagged photos were not
systematically rechecked for errors the software might have missed. Your result
will depend on how consistently your team shoots. That is why the full trial
runs on your own photos: don’t accept our number — measure yours.