If you're new to reselling, you need to know a few things that will help you understand why you might want this app at all. On marketplaces like Poshmark, Depop, Vestiaire Collective, and others, you'll find sellers with a wide variety of diligence and care. Some people (like me) just want to sell the stuff they own to earn a little extra money, while others use resale apps to make a full-time living -- and generally speaking, it shows. The more serious sellers display their clothing on dress forms and mannequins, photograph from all angles and under studio-quality lighting, and include numerous pictures of the clothing articles with measuring tape laid across them.
To be clear, I don't do that and my stuff sells just fine, but this isn't my real job; it's a hobby. The problem is that I would sell more if I included slightly more detail -- especially measurements. I do sometimes haul out my tape measure and I've tried using the native Measure app on my iPhone. While the latter is very accurate, it has a crucial problem: If I measure, say, shoulder to shoulder on a shirt, then try to measure shoulder to bottom hem, the shoulder-to-shoulder measurement disappears. I can't keep multiple measurements on the image at once. Moreover, I can't use the native app to take an in-app photo. I have to try to screenshot it while holding the phone steady.
Uploading these shoddy, blurry measurement photos isn't really helpful. In fact, last week, a buyer returned an item to me because she said the waistband measurement I'd provided wasn't accurate. I disagreed with that, but when I looked at the listing, I saw how it was pretty blurry.
AI Measure is a very unassuming app. Half the text is in English and the other half is in Japanese, but it's so easy to use that it really doesn't matter. All it does is measure your clothing and mark those measurements directly on the image, which you snap using the in-app shutter button. That's it. Even if all the text were in Japanese, you'd be able to figure it out with no problem.
You can measure long-sleeved shirts, short-sleeved shirts, camisoles, pants, and skirts. Selecting one of those from the menu along the bottom of the screen brings up an outline of that item overlaid onto your camera view. Arrange the clothing to match up with the outline, give the app a second, and it'll produce measurements. You can hit the shutter button to snap a pic and the resulting image will have the measurements displayed on there. It's ready to upload to a resale listing.
You can also toggle between Measurement and Normal Shooting, which is a small perk I appreciate. You need to take non-measurement photos for the listing, after all, and not having to shut this app and open the native camera saves a few seconds, too.
I ran a bunch of tests with this app before I started using it for listings because the last thing I want is to have inaccurate measurements up, then face another return as a result. I'm happy and impressed to report that the shorts (which I measured using the skirt option with no problem), leggings, jeans, and sleeveless top I measured with AI Measure were all marked accurately. I checked each with my normal tape measure. No discrepancies.
The only thing that threw me off was that waist measurements were doubled to reflect the circumference of the waist. So, I measured some medium-sized leggings and the app spit out a 26.2-inch waist measurement. That's the actual waist size, yes, but when I lay a tape measure across the waist, like I would to show the measurements normally, it shows 13 inches. Other measurements, like the width of the thigh, were not represented in circumference.
There are a few buggy things that I noticed in testing this out. First, AI Measure has a feature that is meant to help you remove the background of your photos. A lot of sellers cut the backgrounds out of their listing pictures, so I can see how that's helpful to have built-in. Personally, I only nuke the background when my apartment is a little messy, but again, I don't claim to be doing this professionally or with the intention of earning big bucks. I tried out the AI Measure background remover, thinking maybe it could help me turn over a new, more professional leaf, but it didn't work. It removed not only the background, but the section of clothing it was measuring. I thought it might be because I was photographing the pieces on my light-colored rug, so I laid them across my darker wood floor, but it didn't help.
Is that the end of the world? No, not for me, but I can see how it would annoy someone who wanted to do all of their picture-taking and editing in one app.
There's another cool feature that automatically copies measurements to your clipboard once you take your image, so you can put them in the description of your listing. That worked just fine for me.
I do wish more clothing types worked in the app, however. I tried pretty hard to take measurements of a camisole bodysuit I have, using the camisole preset option. It just wouldn't work. You are limited to the clothing types the app recognizes. Again, no big deal, since you could whip out the tape measure if you really had to. This, ultimately, is just meant to speed up the process when and where it can. Any little help like that is appreciated by me.
