N° 005 — About
Who's behind the desk.
What Shoes Are These? is a small, independent tool with one job: telling you what a shoe or bag in a photo is — and being straight about how sure it is.
FIG. 01 — Method
What happens to a photo
01
Shrunk in your browser
Before upload, your browser re-encodes the photo to at most 1024 pixels. That also drops the file's metadata, including any location.
02
Read by a vision model
The image goes to Claude, a vision-language model made by Anthropic, with instructions to name the brand, model and colorway and say how sure it is.
03
Checked before you see it
Below 60% confidence we don't pick a winner: you get the close candidates and what to photograph to settle it.
FIG. 02 — Testing
How we tested it
Before launch we ran blind tests on photos with neutral file names: 57 shoes — sneakers, worn-in street shots, women's and leather shoes — and 20 bags, from luxury houses to logo-free totes.
- Shoes named
- 51/57
- Bags named
- 19/20
- Confident and wrong
- 0
A small test, not a benchmark. We'll publish more as real usage grows.
FIG. 03 — Rules
Rules we keep
- 01
We don't authenticate
We name the design. Whether a particular bag or pair is genuine is a job for a professional authenticator, and we never say otherwise.
- 02
We don't keep your photo
Photos are processed to answer your request and are not stored by us or used to train models.
- 03
Some links earn a commission
Shop links may be affiliate links. They never change which item we name or how confident we say we are.
- 04
Corrections are welcome
If an answer was wrong, tell us what the item actually was. Corrections are how the prompts get better.
Got it wrong? Tell us.
Send the item's real name and we'll look at what went wrong.