This Delightful New Instagram Algorithm Will Tell You How to Dress Better

If you're anything like us, your Instagram feed is full of carefully framed selfies and snaps of your latest #ootd. (Because, what else?) The app was pretty much made for fashion. And while we're not style blogger status and getting paid thousands (opens in new tab) for a single post, we've all gone to embarrassing extremes to get a good photo (opens in new tab), a.k.a. one that will get maximum likes. Now there's a new tool (opens in new tab) to improve your Instagram pictures, starting at the foundation of it all: your outfit.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed an algorithm that will analyze your photo and make suggestions to improve it. As explained in the report provided by the Computer Vision Foundation (opens in new tab), "People want to look good; business or casual, elegant or sporty, sexy but not slutty, and of course trendy, particularly so when putting their picture online. Our goal is to learn and predict how fashionable a person looks on a photograph and suggest subtle improvements the user could make to improve her/his appeal." Um… yes, please!

The researchers mined data from chictopia.com (opens in new tab), a social website where users share photos of their outfits. Using the site's 144,169 posts, the team was able to amass highly detailed statistics for each user, their photo and the fashion it features, along with the comments and response it received from the rest of the Chictopia community. This Fashion144k Dataset, as it's called, revealed certain correlations and patterns between aspects of a post and the interest it generated, which information the smart folks in Toronto then crunched and coded into their intricate (and seriously brilliant) fashionability-predicting algorithm.

Input a photo and the algorithm assesses "the type of outfit and garments, the type of user, the setting/scenery of the photograph, and fashionability of the user's photograph." Then, the code will churn out a rich set of feedback including outfit recommendations, suggested locations to show off your look, plus notes on how well it fits, the lighting and angle of the photo, and other similar elements that may affect the aesthetic quality.

Can you say GAME CHANGER?!