Cast a Hexagram from a Photo
Cast an I Ching hexagram from any photo — the image's bytes become a SHA-256 digest, the digest becomes six lines, and the file is discarded, never stored.
A photo of this moment
The sky outside your window right now. The cup on your desk. The selfie you're not sure you'll post. The old photo you can't bring yourself to delete. Any image can be cast. Plum Blossom numerology drew its numbers from whatever met the eye; casting from a photo is the modern version of the same intuition: the scene in front of you is already a set of numbers.
How the algorithm works
No image recognition, no “AI looking at your photo,” and no mysticism: we read the image file's bytes, compute a SHA-256 digest, split its 32 bytes into six bands and take each band's mean — above the median is yang, below is yin, stacked bottom to top, and the band farthest from the median becomes the single moving line. The whole computation is written into the trace and can be recomputed independently — derivations on the math page. Determinism holds here too: same file, same hexagram, always.
Privacy: computed, then discarded
The image is never stored. Bytes are read into memory, the digest is computed, and the original file is discarded; the casting record keeps only the filename, size, and digest value. Your photo does not live on our servers — a point that matters more for photos than anything else, which is why it gets its own section.
An exercise in noticing
The best use of photo casting is as an excuse to stop: photograph the scene in front of you, let it resolve into a hexagram, then read the judgment's imagery against the scene itself. You'll start noticing why you took that picture and what it reminds you of — which is exactly what the Plum Blossom tradition meant by drawing images from observed things. The text and music doors are casting from text and casting from a song.
Reading the result
Same as any cast: the judgment for the situation, the moving line for the variable, the changed hexagram for the direction — see changing lines. The result page carries the full trace and a share card.