Neha's Photo Find

The reunion group photo holds about eighty faces. The register says a hundred and twelve came. Tap faces until you know who was really there.

Who this is for

Neha Bhandari is secretary of the 1998 batch alumni association in Nagpur. She keeps a list of 340 names, of whom 112 registered for the reunion at the college lawn. It is Sunday morning. The WhatsApp group has 600 photos from last night, her phone is warm, and someone has already asked her twice for the list of who attended, because the association needs it before the next meeting.

How the job is done today

There is one official group photo taken on the steps at eight o'clock, and half the batch was still in the queue for chaat when it was shot. The register at the gate stopped being signed after the first hour. Neha has an Excel sheet of who sent her money on UPI, which is not the same as who turned up. So she zooms into the group photo on her laptop, counts heads, gets a different number each time, and asks the WhatsApp group who the man in the grey bandhgala on the left is. Forty people reply. Two of them are joking. Nobody writes it down anywhere she can use.

The screens, in order

1. Find yourself — You pick your name from the batch list and tap your own face in the big photo, which teaches the whole game without a single line of instruction.
2. Match a face — One face cut out of somebody's candid sits at the top and the group photo sits below it, and you either tap where that person is standing or say they are not in the group photo at all.
3. Agree or not — A quick round where you see what somebody else decided and either wave it through or push it back, so no name settles on one person's word.
4. Add your photos — Where alumni drop last night's candids from their gallery so there are more faces for everyone else to hunt.
5. Who was there — The settled answer for Neha and for anyone curious: people found in the group photo, people found only in candids, and people on the register who are in no photograph at all.

What it keeps track of

• Faces in the group photo — where the box sits on the photo, who we think it is, how many people agreed, whether it has settled
• Candid photos — who sent it, roughly when in the evening, how many faces have been cut out of it so far
• Faces cut from candids — which photo it came from, where in it, who it was matched to in the group photo, or marked as not in the group photo
• Batch list — name, year, whether they said they were coming, whether they paid, phone number that only Neha can see
• Turns — who tapped, what they said, whether the next person agreed, when

The one decision that matters

Does the first answer stick, or does a name need two people to agree? First answer sticking is quicker and the game moves, but one confident wrong tap becomes the official record, and this record is going to a committee meeting. Make it two. The second person only sees a face and a name and swipes yes or no, which takes two seconds and is faster than the first round, so people who join on Wednesday still have plenty to do. The disagreements are the useful part: when two people insist on different names for the same face, that face goes to Neha with both answers attached rather than quietly picking one. Everything is shown, never sounded. A box snapping green, a card sliding off, a counter dropping from 31 to 30. People play this in bed next to a sleeping child.

What to leave out of the first version

No automatic face detection. Nobody needs a computer guessing at faces and being wrong about the back row. Neha and one friend sit for an evening and drag boxes around the faces in the one group photo, and that is done forever. Faces in the candids get cut out the same way by whoever uploads, or by anyone playing. Cleaning up bad guesses would cost more evenings than drawing eighty boxes once. Also skip the leaderboard for now, because five competitive people will finish everything by Tuesday and the rest will never open it.

How you would know it worked

On Sunday night Neha finds 31 people who were plainly there and were never in the group photo, and four names on her register who appear in no photograph anywhere. She messages those four. Two left before dinner, one never came, one was behind the camera all evening.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I run the alumni association for our 1998 batch in Nagpur and we just had our reunion. There is one big group photo from the college steps with about eighty faces in it, and around six hundred candid photos people have sent to our WhatsApp group. I want a link I can share where anyone from the batch picks their name, finds their own face in the group photo first, and then keeps tapping faces cut from other people's photos to say where that person is standing in the big one, or that they are not in it at all. A name should only settle once a second person has agreed, and where two people disagree, show both to me instead of choosing. It must all work with the sound off. At the end give me one list of who was actually there and who I could not find in any photo, so I can ring them.