

Ask HN: Please evaluate my web site idea - J-dawg

I&#x27;ve had an idea for a website&#x2F;startup for a little while which seems fairly obvious to me, and yet I&#x27;ve never seen the idea put into practice. I&#x27;m curious as to whether this has already been implemented, or if my thinking is flawed in some way and it&#x27;s actually a bad idea. I&#x27;d love to know what the HN crowd thinks!<p>The premise: even in a world where photo-sharing is everywhere (and free), people are still willing to pay real money for a professional-quality photograph of them doing something really cool (e.g. running a marathon).<p>For evidence of this see: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marathonfoto.com&#x2F; (official photographer of the London Marathon). A single image download costs £19.95. But why should &quot;official&quot; event photographers have the monopoly on this? Events like marathons take place on public streets, anybody can take photos.<p>So I imagine a site where professional or amateur photographers can upload photos they have taken and offer them for sale. The upload process would automatically add a watermark to the preview images and display them at low resolution. Buyers can then search and browse photos and download the high-res, watermark-free version. They would pay a fixed fee per photo, which would be split between the photographer and the site.<p>This idea naturally lends itself to big sports events like marathons because everyone is wearing a number, so tagging and searching photos is a lot easier (hopefully it would be possible to implement OCR to do this automatically).<p>However there&#x27;s really no reason why it couldn&#x27;t be extended to other use cases (outdoor sports, festivals). Sure the tagging process would be a little more difficult, but photos could be tagged based on colour of clothes, gender, location, time of day etc to make searching possible.<p>To extend the idea further, you could even have a mobile app that people can install, which tracks their location and compares where they&#x27;ve been with the geotags and date info of images available for sale.
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tobltobs
I am not sure but I would think about: \- Legal problems. Would a not
accredited photograph be allowed to make photos of persons and sell them. \-
OCR problems. I would be surprised if you would be able to read more than 50%
of the numbers. I think 20%-30% is more realistic. \- 20$ for a picture is not
really pricey. \- The official photographer will always have the advantage of
the official communication channel over you. He can send a preview image to
the runner as he usually knows the email address. \- Biggest problem would be
the chicken and egg problem. How to get enough photographer to use it if there
are not a lot of customer at the beginning. How to get enough customer use
your system if there are not all photos of all runner.

