Cartoonify was an experiment launched by the Kapwing team in July 2018. The goal of the project was to enable any user to turn an image into a hand-drawn cartoon powered by artificial intelligence. The project was based off of Google's Quick, Draw! dataset and the Draw This! project by Dan Macnish.
This project allowed any user to upload an image, and turn it into a cartoon style drawing. It was featured in The Verge and various other online outlets.
After choosing an image to upload, and a brief loading period, the sketched output would be returned to the user for viewing and download. Many interesting outputs were generated, ranging from very relevant to barely recognizable.
Images with a single object usually worked best, as the cartoon representation were usually single object sketches. Images with a self portrait or human depiction were turned into a stick figure type of cartoon.
The original project used a neural network to turn the uploaded images into a unique cartoon. While the original Draw This! project used a camera that turned captured images into cartoons, Cartoonify was a step towards making this technology available to anyone online.
Due to rising server costs, the project was deprecated in 2023, after over 100,000 cartoons were generated by users from all around the world. Many of the features have been moved to the main Kapwing product. For other AI image generation features, try the Kapwing video editor.
From the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much for all your support for Cartoonify, and making the internet more accessible and creative.
