Andrew Lowell Richardson

Picasso Painted It

Picasso Painted it is an engaging website that transforms user-uploaded images into the style of selected Picasso paintings using neural style transfer. The modified images are collected and displayed on a public gallery page so users can get a little inspiration.

The data scientists on our team worked on training a neural style transfer model and created a Flask application which used the model to process images. I worked with a partner on the backend Node.js application. We wrote API endpoints to accept images from the React.js frontend to store uploaded images in Cloudinary using their excellent API. If I could do one thing differently, I would have figured out how to save the user-uploaded pictures as binary blobs into a database or used a third-party storage system of some kind. We realized halfway through the project that saving the pictures in the filesystem wouldn't work because Heroku flushes the filesystem each day. It's high on my list of weekend projects to dive back in and make that fix so those images aren't broken for the many (unexpected!) users who still use the site.