
Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You - jpren
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/08/yc-funded-snapjoy-will-organize-your-photos-for-you-and-make-sure-you-dont-lose-them/
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EwanG
My feature requests (as they have been for every service I've tried from
Flickr, to 500px, to Smugmug):

1) Let me upload my RAWs. Better if you can display them as is, but at least
do what Adobe does and show the embedded JPEG if not.

2) Allow me to edit online with HTML5 compatible tools (Adobe's online service
will let you edit, but uses Flash for some odd reason). With that I can edit
from the road using my iPad.

3) If you want to make money, help me make money too... i.e. better to take a
share of sales (win-win) then charge me and I have to hope I make enough to
justify paying you. Even better if you can help me market.

4) Killer option even if you fail on the previous three - identify the things
I can't. Wildflowers are number one on this list, but animals can be an issue
sometimes as well. It wouldn't hurt if you can take my location from the
photo, figure out which way I'm facing (time of day and angle of sun), and
identify that peak in the distance as well (though supposedly the military is
working on that one).

5) One I am surprised I don't see more of on the photo sites - run some juried
contests. Great way to spark interest in your site, as well as let folks know
they can find the up and coming photographers with some help (sort of like
500px's "editor's choice", but with benefits.

6) One more "killer" feature - tell me what I did wrong. If I ask you to look
(programmatically) at my photo, take a look at the curves and the EXIF data,
and tell me what I should have done to get a better picture.

7) Final request - give me a way to take what you have organized, and pull it
back as those same albums onto my PC. That reduces guess work of what I have
or haven't backed up, and lets me not worry as much about whether you will
still be around in two years.

~~~
salvadors
#6 sounds like a really great idea. Does a version it exist anywhere in any
form? Plugins for Photoshop/Lightroom/Aperture/whatever? Standalone desktop
software? Anything?

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benatkin
For professionals there's <http://www.imatest.com/home>

~~~
salvadors
Thanks. It definitely seems like where a super-super-simplistic version for
amateurs would be of great value, especially if it can work across multiple
images, spotting mistakes you tend to make regularly.

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mahyarm
Both Kicksend and Snapjoy insist on Real Names, very irritating. (Is it a YC
trend?) Will you purge accounts that don't use them G+ style? Will I upload a
bunch of files, have them no where else (your average person) and then find
out they've disappeared one day because of an inane real name policy with no
recourse? How about if I don't have a last name, and have to make one up to
fill out your form? You'll get real names with payed accounts, but it's
otherwise unwelcome.

~~~
mechanical_fish
True Names, broken though the model is, are the fad of the hour because Google
is hell-bent on them. And since it is the fondest wish of many funded startups
to be bought by Google, nobody is going to get fired for doing exactly what
Google is doing at any given moment.

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alanning
I've been looking for something like this but as a desktop photo backup app
with cloud option. With two young kids I have tons of pictures and videos to
wade through and its just not cost effective to store it all on the cloud when
2TB drives cost $100. But it is _such_ a pain for my wife and I when we
consolidate pics from our various devices and then do a backup to multiple USB
drives. And its just going to get worse over time.

What I would love is an app that would analyze my library, eliminate exact
dups, and backup automatically to each drive when I plug them in. Kind of like
iPhone sync but from devices->comp->external storage. Super Bonus Points if it
can auto-level pics.

But the biggest time sink is winnowing down the raw photos to a best-of list
suitable to upload to an online photo sharing site. Usually we take 4 or 5
pics that are all about the same and then have to go through each 'group' and
pick the best. Having so many usually means we just skip it and store them all
for later. But that's really just delaying the pain, someday when we want to
show them off its really gonna hurt. Its generally more important to me to get
an OK pic that conveys the idea of the 'memory' rather than spending the extra
time to pick the absolutely best shot.

Fancy algo's to the rescue?

~~~
brlewis
Actually, even very dumb algorithms totally destroy the problem you describe
in your third paragraph.

Even if all you do is organize by date and show the first few photos for each
day ("featured" photos), that's enough to vary the stream of photos people
browse through.

I speak from experience, as someone who runs a photo-sharing site that
organizes by date. I also make it easy to switch between featured/non-featured
for any photo, but doing such switching is not a prerequisite. You already
have a nicely varied collection just by uploading.

From what I've seen of Snapjoy so far, their format also guarantees variety. I
haven't seen the fancy algorithms in action yet, but I imagine there are
techniques one could use to make the initial set of "featured" photos more
likely to be varied.

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rodh257
I like the idea, definitely need a Windows client though. I think you should
also release pricing pretty soon, I don't want to go through the effort of
uploading photos if its going to be very expensive all of a sudden. I'd also
like to point out that 'a few gigs' is not very many photos these days. I'm
not photographer but I had 3-4 gigs of photos after my recent 3 week trip to
the USA on just a fairly basic digital camera.

Your price point is going to be a tricky one to pick. Dropbox charges around
$10 for 50gb, which if I was only using it for photo backups, would be too
much, and I'd not do it.

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blazamos
Feature request: allow me to pull all of my photos from my current Flickr
account via their API.

~~~
jpren
We have a lot of great ideas brewing around pulling your photos from other
services. Stay tuned!

~~~
zeedog
The feature to avoid duplicates will be a huge help when importing from those
other services.

~~~
brlewis
It will be tough to detect duplicates from Facebook, where they recompress and
strip metadata.

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dschobel
Glad that the TC article touches on it, but with the track record of YC
company acquisitions and killing products (yes yes, I realize dropbox is an
exception), it really feels like a leap of faith to trust a YC associated
backup service.

I can deal with having to export my files in case of acquisition, but it will
keep me from suggesting this service (which sounds awesome, by the way) to
non-technical friends and family.

~~~
mrkurt
Have there been companies that were acquired and just shut down/deleted
everything? The ones I've seen just said "we're ceasing operations in 90 days,
please back your data up".

~~~
dschobel
My concern isn't their vanishing overnight.

My concern is recommending the service to my 70 year old father and getting a
confused phone call from him about why his bookmarks are broken and instead
lead to an acquisition notice and then having to walk him through the export
process.

In other words, the value to me in recommending these services to my friends
and family is 1) that they'll use them and see some benefit and 2) that I
won't have to support it.

And, at the risk of getting all patio11, you know who spends a lot of time
organizing photos? Older folks and housewives; NOT Silicon Valley wunderkinds
who are trying out the latest and greatest YC company which got a mention on
TechCrunch. The problem this team will face is that you have technically
literate people like me standing between them and the non-technical friends
and family who will shell out $20/mo until the end of time to organize and
share photos of their grandkids.

If this is just a tech demo before a FB acquisition, disregard the whole thing
though. :)

~~~
hopeless
That's one of the things I've loved about Smugmug over the past 5-6yrs:
they're profitable, they're independent and they don't have any intention of
selling out. They're a brand I trust and believe in, which is why I give them
my money.

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bryanallen22
I saw this at work, signed up, and uploaded a few pics. I wanted to check it
out later when I had more time. By the time I got home, I had forgotten the
name of the service. I checked my email to see some kind of welcome message,
but I didn't get one.

While I appreciate your efforts not to spam, a simple email might help your
users find you, learn know how to use your service, etc.

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dfischer
Is there anything else on the market that is similar to this? I'm just curious
for comparisons.

I'm definitely hesitant to use this because of lack of pricing, and I also
have no idea what's "smart" about this besides it being organized by date. I
don't want to upload 1,000 photos and see it in action. Show me examples on
the site.

There's no easy way of sharing photos either which is a deal breaker for now.

~~~
brlewis
My site <http://ourdoings.com/> also organizes by date, and there are samples
on the front page you can click through to see different people's timelines.

However, I think Snapjoy's right to tell people to upload their own photos to
see it in action. To me, 2005/December means Puerto Rico. For it to mean that
to you I have to tag/caption/etc. Upload 1,000 of your own photos and you'll
see how easy it is to have a navigable, varied, enjoyable collection. (That
sentence applies to any site that organizes by date and uses any algorithm to
mitigate the too-many-redundant-photos problem).

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cmwright
This looks terrific, I've begun the task of uploading photos. Funny question
to be asking on my first day I guess, but has anyone figured out how to delete
photos once they're already up?

~~~
cmwright
aha, figured it out. Hovering over the picture in certain bulk modes shows a
check mark, clicking this checkmark brings up a bulk editing view where you
can send to trash. I don't believe it's possible to delete single photos

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PStamatiou
Grats guys, I love Snapjoy's ease of use.. and the desktop uploader app is
awesome.

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grandalf
This looks amazing!

Does it let me use one account across several computers so that all photos end
up in the same cloud account?

~~~
jpren
Absolutely. We're going to be pulling your photos from web services and other
devices soon :)

~~~
grandalf
wow. I think you've just solved my "photo problem".

What about if I have more photos than hard drive space?

~~~
jpren
That's cool. We can provide you virtually unlimited storage for your
authoritative photo collection on our servers.

~~~
grandalf
_We can provide you virtually unlimited storage for your authoritative photo
collection on our servers._

That is what I've been looking for, along with a way to have multiple
computers "own" the photos and use them off of the local hard drive as needed
(such as to order prints, etc.)

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clarkevans
For public photos (if you ever add them), it'd be great if there was a clean
way for the poster to assert copyright; and, if they do, a way for 3rd parties
to contact them for image permissions.

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rokhayakebe
I am not sure about the backup your photo pitch. I _think_ the way they are
showing pictures in a horizontal + vertical timeline is very very nice. If I
were a photo person, I would like to have this app talk to Instagram, Picplz,
FB, etc... grab all my pics and show them in such timeline.

~~~
michaeldwan
We agree ;)

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arihant
This is so good. Anybody else feel its way better than Path?

The introduction on the homepage is a bit vague though. Maybe mention that it
organizes by date or some more clue. I had no idea what this service does
unless I visited the live demo.

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gabaix
How do I view all my pictures into one single stream? I like them group for
information, and I also want to see them as iPhoto does it. contact me for
more feedback john {} gabaix.us

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gootik
I uploaded couple of pictures and it said that they are being processed. When
I clicked on the "Dashboard" button to see the progress, it took me to the
welcome page again.

~~~
jpren
Thanks for pointing that out. We probably haven't fully processed a single
image from your queue yet, so sorry about the confusing circle it's throwing
you in during that case... will fix on our end

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Omnipresent
I can not upload my pics that have extension JPG instead of jpg.

jpg == JPG?

~~~
jpren
Ah I believe that issue occurred before when you're on Linux only. It should
be fixed now.

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prawn
Could iPhoto and iCloud be something of a threat here?

~~~
benrequena
I was just thinking the same thing.

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rorrr
And by "organize" they mean "sort by date".

What's the real breakthrough here?

~~~
jpren
There's a lot more than that meets the eye happening beneath the surface. When
you have a thousand photos up there, you'll get a better feel of our
algorithmic clustering.

~~~
rorrr
Well, can you just tell us what the features are?

~~~
iaskwhy
Why can't you try it instead? It's free...

There's at least some work by the algo to recognise different moments of the
same day, I still need to upload more pictures to try to understand it
correctly.

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rorrr
You want me to upload a thousand photos to see how it works? :)

~~~
brlewis
As someone who runs another photo sharing site that organizes for you by date,
I can say yes.

First, it's important to know that uploading a thousand photos is way easier
on such a site, since you do no organizing work. Try uploading a thousand
photos to Flickr without culling, organizing into albums, tagging and
captioning, and see what your result looks like. It doesn't have to be like
that.

Second, they have to be your photos for you to appreciate chronological
organization. When I look at my own, I can say, "Wow, I just click 2005, then
December and I see my Puerto Rico pictures. And I didn't have to organize them
myself." You don't get the same effect looking at someone else's.

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u48998
I manually sort my photos by Date Pictures Taken into their own folders. I
don't see a big deal about this as a separate service.

~~~
brlewis
It doesn't bother you that photo-sharing web sites don't use the same simple
organization scheme you use locally, but require you to create albums, etc.?

~~~
u48998
Not everyone know how to name their photographs. The proper photograph naming
scheme is simply the biggest missed opportunity since the dawn of digital
cameras. Using the naming scheme of Dates Pictures Taken, along with a word or
two of the event, people can save themselves from aggravation in managing
their thousands of digital photos.

Generally, photos are taken of an event and on a particular day. You may have
multiple events in the same day, so you can further nest by time as well. But
that's as far as an average user go.

It should be user's own responsibility to manage their naming schemes and
sorting. You can then upload folders to any web service (or don't even bother
if you use Sugar Sync or Dropbox etc).

