Smilejpg

Smilejpg is a digital art project and online archive devoted to the aesthetics and meaning of smiling imagery within the JPEG format. Founded in 2015 by a loose collective of artists and developers, Smilejpg operates a publicly accessible gallery, submission portal, and toolkit for creating, sharing, and remixing smiling portraits.

Contributors upload portraits that are then tagged with metadata such as smile intensity, lighting, and mood, and works may be released under permissive licenses to facilitate remixing. It emphasizes open ecosystems, preserving original image data while applying non-destructive transformations for display and study.

Technically, Smilejpg provides an API and browser-based editor, along with batch-processing scripts that prepare images for display in its gallery, and a curated archive that documents provenance. The project aims to balance artistic experimentation with transparency around how images are processed and presented.

Reception in digital art discourse has been mixed: supporters argue it offers a playful lens on emotion in mass imagery and a testbed for image-processing ideas; critics worry about commodification of emotion, consent in portrait datasets, and potential biases in representation. Smilejpg has influenced other meme-based archives and has been cited in discussions of open art platforms and the ethics of AI-assisted aesthetics.

See also: JPEG, image ethics, AI art, creative commons.