Why we built a Victorian AI for photo modesty

The internet does not need another serious content moderation tool. It has plenty of those. What it has rather fewer of is tools that paint a full Victorian mourning gown onto a holiday selfie.

Puritanizer started as an afternoon build. It remains, at its core, an afternoon build with a slightly more polished deploy. We are fine with that.

The origin

The premise arrived fully formed: what if you could send any photo of a person to an AI that was absolutely, grimly, comically committed to propriety — and get back the same photo with a full, painted-on outfit that would make a Victorian magistrate nod approvingly? The joke writes itself. The outfit is the joke.

The web works best when people are building things that are pointless in a specific, committed way. A tool that paints inflatable T-Rex costumes onto beach photos is not going to change the world. But it might make someone's Tuesday slightly weirder, which is an outcome worth pursuing.

We built the first version in a few hours and fed it far too many test images. That is usually a good sign.

Why painted outfits and not censor bars

The first version used overlays — top hats, speech bubbles, cats, pixel censors. They were fine. They were not funny enough. There is a ceiling on how amusing a top hat in the wrong place can be, and we hit it quickly.

Painted outfits, on the other hand, are unlimited. A nun habit painted onto a bikini selfie is funnier than a top hat. A Victorian deep-sea diving suit is funnier than a top hat. A full sumo fat suit is — well, you get the idea. The comedy scales with how committed the outfit is to its own bit, and overlays just can't commit like a full Gibson Girl blouse can.

So we ripped the overlay version out and pivoted to painted clothing. The prompt now explicitly instructs Nano Banana to paint a full garment onto the subject while leaving the face untouched. The result is a photo that looks like the subject genuinely went outside dressed as a medieval knight.

The tech

Puritanizer is Next.js 15, deployed on Vercel, with sharp handling watermark compositing on the server for free-tier runs.

The image model is Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Image — Nano Banana in internal shorthand. It does detection and generation in one pass, which means "paint a sari onto this person" happens in a single API call rather than a chained pipeline. This matters a lot for feel: it's the difference between a tool that responds and a tool you wait for.

The outfit catalogue is 350 garments split across 10 categories, each stored as a [label, prompt] tuple. When a user picks "Roll the dice," we shuffle the entire catalogue, pick 8, and send a prompt that asks the model to choose whichever of the 8 fits the subject best. That last bit matters — "choose whichever fits best" means you don't get a full samurai o-yoroi on a beach photo unless it was already the funniest option in the shuffle.

Category mode narrows the shuffle to one category. Specific mode pins a single outfit. The mode is a dropdown in the UI and a form field on the API.

The humour angle

There is a serious version of content moderation, and it is largely joyless. Automated systems that flag and blur things carry a certain administrative grimness that does not really serve anyone. The content disappears, the viewer is left uncertain about what they missed, and nothing particularly funny has happened.

The Victorian framing is a deliberate joke about this. Victorian England was extraordinarily uptight about propriety in public discourse while being, in practice, extremely not uptight about anything in particular. The gap between the official position and the actual behaviour is where comedy lives.

Painting a floor-length mourning gown onto someone does not make the original photo less questionable. But it replaces "something has been removed" with "something has been added" — a visible, committed act of propriety — and that is a more honest account of what content moderation actually is: someone has decided this should not be seen as-is, and here is the visible evidence of the decision.

Closing thought

We are not making any large claims for Puritanizer. It is a tool for painting modest outfits onto photos. It does that reliably, with reasonable style, and it is free to use twice a day without an account.

If you have a photo that could use some period-appropriate discretion, the tool is right there.

Puritanize something and share it →