PhotoGuider: Composition-Aware Cropping and 360° View Framing with Explainable Photographic Assessments

Yuan-Kang Lee, Kuan-Lin Chen, Chia-Che Chang, Yu-Lun Liu

Traditional image cropping assumes the photograph already contains the composition worth keeping, and asks only where to crop. A full 360$^{\circ}$ scene offers no such guarantee: the viewing direction in a scene has to be discovered before anything can be framed. We present PhotoGuider, a measure-then-frame method that answers both questions with compact learned scorers over one shared set of composition-aware features. The designed features are extracted using foundation and task-specific vision models and structured into four photographic tokens: Subject, Composition, Aesthetics, and Integrity. Our MLLM explainer is fine-tuned to generate composition-related explanations conditioned on images and measured token assessments. To our knowledge, PhotoGuider is the first method to combine explicit composition-based direction selection in 360$^{\circ}$ panoramas with refined framing, camera-parameter output for native re-rendering, and measurement-conditioned explanations. On two standard 2D cropping benchmarks, PhotoGuider achieves the highest average mIoU performance against ground-truth crops. In a blind ranking study, 120 participants ranked three cropping methods over 100…