This MIT website will tell you how memorable your photos are
Source: Rebecca Harrington

You know a memorable photo when you see one, but now so does a new artificial intelligence (AI) system called LaMem.

MIT's website lets you upload your photos to try out the algorithm, which we first saw over at Discover Magazine.

To create LaMem, the researchers showed a random set of 60,000 images to users of Amazon's Mechanical Turk site.

Then, as Turk users were shown photos, one image would appear every so often to see if people remembered it.

Using photo-recall data for many different photos, the researchers hammered out a few principles of memorable images and coded LaMem into existence.

Here's how it works ― and how it fared when we uploaded some unarguably iconic images.





Images the researchers used in the study, ranked by how memorable they were from left (most) to right.




LaMem could be used to figure out what images humans remember, the researchers concluded, and use that to develop better educational materials that are more memorable.
LaMem





These five photos were the most memorable in the 60,000 images from the LaMem database.



The iconic sailor photo only scored 0.591, meaning 59% of people would probably remember



Next, I decided to try some of my own images, choosing what ones I thought were the most memorable ― like this one of me on the equator. It was ranked highly memorable. Not bad.




I couldn't score more than a "high" memorability, though. I thought for sure an iconic landmark like the Colosseum could get a "highest" ranking, but no.