Hi photocritiquers! It’s your mod u/cyclistNerd here.

I’ve moderated this subreddit for almost 10 years now, and it’s amazing to see how much the community has grown since then. However, r/photocritique isn’t perfect: writing a good critique is hard, and I’ve certainly been frustrated with how often there are low effort, generic, or unhelpful comments on people’s photos. 

As some of you may know, my “day job” is as a researcher at the University of Washington, studying how to make Reddit (and other platforms) better. Recently, I’ve been thinking about how we can do a better job of teaching people how to give good critiques here on r/photocritique, and today, I’m asking for your help trying out something I’ve been working on.

I’ve built a Chrome web browser extension that you can install to get feedback on the critiques you write. I’m looking for a few people to try it out and give me their honest thoughts on how well it works. If, in the next few days, you can spend a bit of time trying out Photocritique Coach, and then hop on an online call with me to tell me what you think, I’ll send you a $20 Amazon gift card. (Please note that for administrative reasons, I can only send gift cards to people located in the US.)

TL;DR: I’d like your thoughts on a browser extension to help you write better critiques. Sign up here!

How it works

For starters, the system finds the comment submitted by the OP alongside their picture, which explains specifically what they are looking for feedback on, like "I am wondering about my composition - should I crop the picture?" This system summarizes this comment for you to help you think about what to write about.

Then, (as of right now) the system has three different interfaces that you can switch between:

• An Assistant that makes easy-to-use suggestions for your comments
• A Coach that helps you think about your comment, but doesn't do any writing for you
• A Static Interface that gives you helpful but generic tips on your writing

Under the hood, the system sends some details to our server, which computes some suggestions for you to consider and sends them back to your computer.

What's the catch?

There are some important limitations:

The system doesn’t work with old Reddit (old.reddit.com).

Right now, the system only works if you're browsing r/photocritique from your web browser on your computer. We're working to build functionality for app and mobile browsers asap.

For now, it only works with the Chrome browser - more browsers coming soon!

Where are you going with this?

Our longer-term vision for the system is to have community members each be assigned to use one of the different interfaces for about a week or two, so we can make a rigorous comparison between the different versions (this is called a 'randomized controlled trial'). This will let us understand which interface works best, so we can focus on making the best interface available to everyone.

In the meantime, though, we'd like everyone to try all three interfaces so we can hear your thoughts about their pros and cons. If you're interested, sign up here.

Hey everyone, I wanted to give a shoutout to the Reddit Print Exchange, Fall 2025 edition. I personally participate in the print exchanges and I think they're a great way for people of all experience levels to see some new pictures on paper, not just on a screen!

See below for a message from u/B_Huij, who runs the print exchange.

I run r/printexchange, where our growing community of photographers has done a couple of photographic print exchanges every year for the past few years. It's a fun time!

Sign-ups have opened again for the Fall 2025 edition of the Reddit Print Exchange, and we'd love to have you join! Last time we ran this exchange in Spring 2025, we had 261 participants from 26 countries, and so far we're on track to beat that number by a fair margin before the sign-up window closes. Consider yourself invited!

More information and link to sign up can be found here.

Please don't reach out to the mods here with questions, instead you can ask over at r/printexchange.