Ask HN: What did you use for free bulk photo background removal?

3 points by sema4hacker 3y ago ↗ HN

I have 10,000 JPEG files on my Windows machine for which I need to remove backgrounds, and zero budget to do it. I've tried free tools like ImageMagick and Gimp using their floodfill technique with fuzzing of parameters, which only works well with more-or-less solid backgrounds, and fails miserably on my photos since they have more varied backgrounds. Please tell me if I'm wrong, but the many online services all appear to require payment and/or don't offer bulk processing. I'm about to go down the rabbit hole of coding a solution from amongst a myriad of possible tools, not knowing how they compare in quality and ease of programming:

BoofCV GluonCV halide MATLAB OpenCV PIL/Pillow PyTorch/torchvision scikit-image SimpleCV U^2-Net

Do you have any recommendations?

4 comments

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mtmail 3y ago ↗

https://backgroundremover.app/ (powered by https://github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover) was a Show HN last year. I haven't used it myself yet.

sema4hacker 3y ago ↗

Not a free site, and the github version install instructions failed while trying to install pytorch (I'm not real familiar with the Python environment).

owenpalmer 3y ago ↗

Looks like the website uses the free open source project on the backend

Finally found the Python rembg library. It works and is easily embedded.