

Show HN: Tookapic – Take one photo a day for 365 days - pawelkadysz
https://tookapic.com

======
pawelkadysz
We're probably going to hit the 20,000 photos milestone today. It's not much.
But our users are allowed to upload only one photo per day. That's 20,000 days
of couple of hundred people. Almost 55 years worth of photos :)

I'm looking for feedback on the UX, design and also any tips on getting
traction, which I really struggle with.

Thank you!

~~~
techaddict009
Awesome congrats for achieving that figure. Its not that easy to reach that
milestone. Plus I dont think everyone would surely upload a pic daily.

Some would have surely missed some day. True? Any data on that?

~~~
pawelkadysz
Quite a lot of users keep uploading daily. If you do that, your "Streak
number" grows. Once you stop uploading for more than two days - the streak
number goes back to zero (you can still upload those missed photos though).
You can see a list of users sorted by their streak number here:
[https://tookapic.com/projects?sort=streak](https://tookapic.com/projects?sort=streak)

~~~
techaddict009
Awesome work.

Can you share tech stack used?

And what exactly you use to store the photos?

Edit: I see you are using imgix but I feel they are bit costly. Did you
compare them with anyone before finalizing them?

~~~
Idered
As backend framework we're using Laravel hosted on digital ocean. Images are
hosted on Amazon S3, we also queue uploads to S3 with SQS. Imgix is great
service and I can't even imagine building tookapic without it. For database we
use postgresql. Any other questions :)?

~~~
Killswitch
I just saw this thread while browsing the Show HN section. Nice stack, Laravel
is a good framework.

My only suggestion would be with the domain you have, make user pages
subdomains. It's easy to achieve in Laravel and makes a more pleasing url.

Instead of
[https://tookapic.com/photos/21408](https://tookapic.com/photos/21408) you
could make it
[https://pawelkadysz.tookapic.com/21408](https://pawelkadysz.tookapic.com/21408)

And even take that a step further and use slugs for urls instead of ID's
[https://pawelkadysz.tookapic.com/playing-with-
light](https://pawelkadysz.tookapic.com/playing-with-light)

URL design is a huge thing that many often ignore, but I feel is essential to
a website.

~~~
pawelkadysz
Thanks for the suggestion.

Actually we're testing premium features, like custom domains and themes.
username.tookapic.com would be reserved for premium users. Right now
pawelkadysz.tookapic.com points to 404 (which should be fixed next week). But
the custom domain hooked up to the site works just fine, see for yourself:
[http://daily.pawelkadysz.com](http://daily.pawelkadysz.com) \- this is the
kind of premium theme I'm talking about (it's all powered by tookapic).

As for the slugs and URLs. At first we had it like this:
tookapic.com/username/ID-slug but we had some issues with people changing
their usernames (that's allowed) and putting weird characters in the photo
titles, which all resulted in breaking the links and pointing to 404 in the
end.

That's why we changed it to how it works now. No username change nor emoji in
photo title will break the link now.

~~~
Killswitch
Ah cool cool. For slug issues, Laravel comes with a support strings helper
function for turning strings into slugs.

Regarding usernames, well I see the usecases for allowing changes and not
allowing. So I guess that's up to you.

All in all, I love the project. I'm not a photographer but the design of the
site is beautiful, and well. I'm jealous. haha.

------
samplusplus
I see you offer stock photos, are these the users photos? Do we give up the
rights to our own photos by using this service. Can you elaborate on this some
more?

~~~
pawelkadysz
All the details are available on the licensing page:
[https://tookapic.com/licensing](https://tookapic.com/licensing)

It's up to you if you want to share those photos as free, or even sell them
for real money. You can of course keep all the copyrights and even watermark
your photos.

You have all the choices on the upload page:
[http://cl.ly/c6Qt](http://cl.ly/c6Qt)

~~~
samplusplus
@pawelkadysz thanks for the reply. That is what I hoped! I love it. The site
is a neat idea. Keep it up.

------
LukeB_UK
Looks cool. The only little nitpick I have is that the "place to start your
365 project" tagline made me think it was referring to Office365 at first. Not
sure if that's just me though.

------
elijahlofgren
Really cool idea!

Minor suggestion, make the TOS link on your signup form open in a new window,
that way someone signing up without manually opening in new window won't lose
what they've typed.

~~~
pawelkadysz
Good point. We'll take care of it first thing tomorrow.

------
cableshaft
Y Combinator had funded a previous version of this concept, called DailyBooth,
but it eventually shut down. You have a slightly different take on it though,
making it a 365 project (and allowing people to sell photos). I thought it was
a fun website and was sad when it shut down. I wish you a better fortune than
they had :).

------
wonnage
The size restrictions prevent uploading iPhone photos, which seems kinda
ridiculous.

~~~
pawelkadysz
Minimum photo size is 1280px (width). As far as I know iPhones have 8MP
cameras. Unless you crop it to 50% the size it should work just fine. Also,
there's an iOS app coming in a couple of weeks which will make uploading from
iPhone much, much easier.

~~~
wonnage
Ah, I had taken it in portrait orientation. Maybe taking the longest edge
would make sense?

