Show HN: Easy photo sharing – no sign-up required – weekend project
pixomize.comAuthor here.
While some are solving important and complex problems, I created yet another photo sharing service :) And no sexy features included.
The basic idea is to try to be as simple as possible without needing to create an account nor needing to download any special client. A simple way to gather photos from an event.
This is mostly a project to try, to test, to research and to learn new stuff.
You know what would be cool? Add context to the photos yourself to make them searchable. This can be done by auto-tagging all photos so if I have a large album, I would be able to search where there's "garden" in the picture or "eiffel tower" in the picture and it gets me those pics. Much like Google's image search.
If you need pointers, I would be glad to help!
Nice idea. Not sure yet if it's a killer feature, but as you said, would be definitely cool.
So how could I get started? I can sure tag the photos but how could I get the "auto-tagging" working? Album name is not enough, so you must be thinking of something I have no idea nor knowledge of yet :)
You might want to have the ability to designate something as "adult". It might not be what you envisioned it for but I could see people using it to share something explicit.
True. But as I see it, if people want to share something explicit they are more than welcome to do so. Right? Or did I understood something differently than you meant?
The owner of the album has the right to delete any photos of an album if they find some "too explicit" for their taste.
The problem is that if you make the album public anybody could add anything. For example I just added a new picture to you Paris album (of Paris), but could have just of easily added something pornographic.
Yes you can delete it, but unless you monitor it 24/7 it will stay up until you delete it. Two solutions:
1. Have all photos submitted from people other then the owner go to a holding folder for approval by the owner, before they are published to the main folder. 2. A really good filter that will filter out pornographic images (you may or may not allow this to be turned off).
I really like your 1st option / idea. Will think about it a bit more and implement that as an option for an album owner to decide.
Thanks mate!
Thanks @HenryMc, Solution 1 implemented (owner of the album can decide).
Koski, do you live in the bay area?
Nope, currently in Finland.
Mind if I ask why? :)
I like this idea more and more as I see it.
One note, the text on the "Add New Photo" link says "Please not that "... That should be "note" not "not".
Additionally, the section after the email instructions seems like it could use some rephrasing.
Does the album owner get teaser emails close to the expiration of the album reminding them to either download the archive or pay more to keep it online?
You should also make an option so the album owner can send a message to all the email addresses that sent in photos. A use case would be to notify all the people that submitted pictures to download the archive before it's removed.
Kudos, this is a neat project. I see a clear path to success with the wedding industry. Simply posting some signs around a venue asking people to visit pixomize.com/SomeWedding2014 or emailing their pictures to SomeWedding2014@pixomize.com would be great. In fact, you could charge more for the service if you target that demographic.
Thanks for the heads up for the typo. Will be fixed in the next push. Will rephrase the second instruction after also.
Currently the album owner gets teaser emails that the album is about to expire. Owner cannot buy "more online time" yet but that is on my road map. I will not need that feature before some weeks when the first albums start expiring :)
Good point about an option for the owner to send email. I will think about it. There is already a automatic notify that is sent to everyone who posted to the expiring album saying "the album is expired now, but you can still download all the photos as a zip file from this link".
Do you mind if I ask couple of technical questions?
- How did you cope with the traffic from HN?
- The image resize service you implemented (photo.pixomize.com) is so simple and clean I want to know how did you implemented it? is it implemented from scratch?
What I like about photo.pixomize.com is the simplicity in the URL and how you can simply create thumbnail and download it and it's pretty fast.
There are lot's of image resize services out there which do the exact same thing as a SaaS.
More than happy to answer. I am planning to write a blog post about technical parts soon.
The traffic was not that big for this kind of sites. Yesterday there seemed to be around 2.5K visitors from HN and each having average 2.1 page views per session.
The resizing service is implemented from scratch. It's very simple (resize and cache) and does not have the possibility to define point of interest (yet - I would like to do some experiences with that too).
I'm currently writing a technical blog post about Pixomize.
What payment methods do you accept? I can only see an email field with a "Order the upgrade with 1€" button.
Good question. Currently none.
Current usage levels have been so low that I have not yet used too much time to implement the payment methods.
I'm currently validating that people will click that button enough so that it's worth to implement the payment.
I should probably change that euro char to dollar one.
nice weekend project, are you targeting some specific audience in particular ?
Yes, people who:
A) don't want to be everybody's fb friends/g+/etc who were in a friend's birthday party, but still wants to share the photos she took at the party
B) easy for anybody to share an album and other to participate - usually after such a birthday as mentioned above, one person's photos are in fb, other one's in G+, third's in dropbox... in other words, people who wants to share together.
So basically everyone who has a need to share photos but they don't have a common service to do so.
(edited the format)
Hi, sounds nice. Have you checked projects that are working on this such as: Cluster, BirdBox, Photo Circle, Adobe - GroupPix, SeaHorse, EverSnap, CapsuleCam. How do you differentiate your product from those services?
Yeah, I have check some of them.
- Cluster, one needs to install app on it (needs iphone or android).
- BirdBox, one needs to install app on it (and only iphone)
- Adobe - GroupPix, is pretty close but one needs an app on it
- SeaHorse - one needs to login, have an app
- EverSnap - nice one, but needs an app for it
- CapsuleCam - needs an app
So yes, so my idea here is that one would not need to install yet another app or register.
(Never heard Photo Circle before. Will check it out.)
(edit: changed format, typo)
Kudos for providing a web-based solution and breaking the annoying trend of requiring yet another app to accomplish something!
Does this have any particular advantages over imgur?
How I see it, these two services are for pretty different use cases. Basic idea behind Pixomize is to have a common album with your friends or other people and you fill the album together.
Have you checked this? http://www.aoneapps.com/reviews/glimpix-group-photo-sharing/
Yes, but it needs an app to post the photos. And it has slightly different usecases that I'm after. (Pixomize is more like: "everyone who wants to share photos, just post them to this email address so we can all download them").
nice! :-)
What about providing a carousel of latest/random albums to make it easy to find great photos?