A shoe-store flip-over, from a photo.
Good running-shoe fitters do one thing before they show you a single new pair: they ask for your old ones and flip them over. The rubber tells them where you land, how you roll, and whether the shoe is actually finished. Sole Reader does that read from a photo, for free, without an account.
It exists because the question people actually type into a search bar is “are my running shoes done?”, and the answer they get is a mileage rule of thumb that is off by a hundred miles either way. The sole is the better witness.
How the read works
- 01Your browser shrinks the photo to 1,400 pixels on its longest side and re-encodes it as a JPEG. That drops the file to a few hundred kilobytes and strips the location data phones embed in photos.
- 02A vision model rates nine zones of the outsole, 0 to 3: crisp, smoothing, tread gone, worn through. It is told which shoe it is looking at so it can anchor the arch side, and it is told to rate only what it can see and to lower its confidence when part of the sole is out of frame.
- 03Plain code does the rest. Miles left blends the wear map with the distance you enter against the usual 300 to 500 mile lifespan for a road trainer (150 to 250 for plated racers). Landing style comes from where the wear concentrates. The next-shoe category comes from a short, conservative rule set: a stability shoe is suggested only when inner-edge wear and a symptom you reported point the same way, and a supinator is never sent to one.
- 04Shoe picks come from a hand-checked list of current models with their drop, weight and price verified against the brands and specialist retailers. Picks are ranked by fit to your read. Some purchase links are affiliate links; the ranking never looks at commission.
Where it hedges, and why
Landing style is well supported by outsole wear. Pronation is not: research that measures the foot directly finds only a loose relationship between how much it rolls and how the shoe wears, and plenty of healthy runners pronate more than the textbooks suggest. So Sole Reader reports pronation as a tendency, labels its confidence, and only lets it change the shoe suggestion when you also report a symptom.
None of this is medical advice. If you are injured, a physiotherapist or sports doctor who watches you run will tell you more in five minutes than any photo can.
Sources the copy is checked against
- Doctors of Running, “Footwear Science: Outsole Wear Patterns”
- Runner’s World, “What your running shoe wear pattern says about your stride”
- Verywell Fit, “What shoe wear patterns mean about your gait”
- Marathon Handbook, “What the wear on your running shoes reveals about your form”
- Brand and retailer product pages for every shoe in the picks list (drop, stack, weight, price)
Who made it
Sole Reader is an independent project built by a runner in Ontario, Canada. It is not affiliated with any shoe brand or retailer. Questions, corrections and shoe suggestions: hello@solereader.com.