

Show HN: Easy photo sharing – no sign-up required – weekend project - koski
http://pixomize.com/

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koski
Author 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.

~~~
iamsalman
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!

~~~
koski
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 :)

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deftnerd
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.

~~~
koski
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".

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armenb
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.

~~~
koski
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.

------
hackplus
What payment methods do you accept? I can only see an email field with a
"Order the upgrade with 1€" button.

~~~
koski
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.

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ing33k
nice weekend project, are you targeting some specific audience in particular ?

~~~
koski
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)

~~~
omerklein
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?

~~~
koski
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)

~~~
Wingman4l7
Kudos for providing a web-based solution and breaking the annoying trend of
requiring yet another app to accomplish something!

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triplekey
Does this have any particular advantages over imgur?

~~~
koski
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.

~~~
omerklein
Have you checked this? [http://www.aoneapps.com/reviews/glimpix-group-photo-
sharing/](http://www.aoneapps.com/reviews/glimpix-group-photo-sharing/)

~~~
koski
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").

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coke
nice! :-)

What about providing a carousel of latest/random albums to make it easy to
find great photos?

