

Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting - supo
http://dofsome.com
Hi, this is a project I've been working on for about 2 months. I am definitely not a designer, so I tried to keep the GUI to minimum and really make the presentation about photos and as fluid as possible.<p>Any feedback welcome! :)
======
e12e
Nice, looks like you've been annoyed at some of the same things I have for a
while. A couple of questions:

1) Unlimited. So you will keep a copy my 1000s of 10-20mb RAW files for 8
USD/Month ?

2) Unlimited part two: How about a x/dollars/month > N _xGB of storage (Where
N is magic:)? IE: Some transparency towards your margins? And accounts for
those that don't need quite 100USD/Year worth of service? I absolutely see
that having a treshhold makes sense, but to me 8/Month seems high.

3) Since you're probably _not* actually _unlimited_ \-- who are your target
users? Someone with 1000s of high quality jpegs? Someone fed up with
picasa/flickr/etc ? Do you have an actual roof on bandwidth?

4) The scaling: Do you do it browser side (ie: most of the pictures are rather
shoddy quality compared to custom scaled/cropped images?)? Some of it server
side, some browser side?

5) Which formats do you support? (Jpeg2000, other high quality formats?)

~~~
supo
Hi,

1) At the moment we only support jpg and png. So a copy of your 1000s of avg
10MB (max worst case global image size average, probably lower). Which is
fine.

2+3) Our motivation with single tier was simplicity. Simplicity of the
homepage, simplicity of thinking while you read something before you hit that
'Try' button..

I am not sure if a general user thinks about our margins and I can be wrong,
but I think we should try to match the value he gets + position ourselves
regarding to competition. If somebody cares about margins the S3 prices are a
pretty good general storage reference point ;-)

To be completely transparent, we currently think that with an unlimited
account we shouldn't get much more than ~40GB of jpegs from a user over his
lifetime ON AVERAGE. Once this is amortized across big enough number of users
I doubt it will get much more than that. zenfolio.com has been around for many
many years and they have an unlimited account for $50/year and cater to
professionals with huge files (think a wedding photographer who uploads couple
GBs each other weekend).

Our average target user is not a pro (we are not aspiring to be a portfolio
website at the moment) but has photography as a hobby and wants a clean no-
bulshit way to upload and share his photos across online and offline personas.

4) All server side, with aggressive caching and on-the-fly scaling. No scaling
on the client.

5) Just a jpeg and png to simplify the pipeline in MVP, if we see an interest
in other formats we will investigate. Would you like to see a support for
jpeg2000? For upload or also for serving? At the moment, the browser support
seems still weak.

~~~
e12e
Thanks for your clear answers :-)

I absolutely see the simplicity argument. Personally I'm not sure if 8/month
is too high though. I'll have to think about it -- with the (very swift)
scaling on the server, I see more what you offer -- not sure if you really fit
_my_ use case though. But you're much nicer IMNHO than flickr/picasa.

I recently priced some storage and found that Amazon/Rackspace are at around
10 cents/GB/Month (without transfer...) and a cheap dedicated server would end
up around 3 cents/GB/Month (with limited transfer -- free in, 5000GB/Month
out) -- but this is for ~2TB of usable storage.

With overhead (all kinds, people, hosting, transfer) -- I suspect it's not
very realistic (or rather, attractive) to compete with Amazon on price. I
certainly don't need 2TB "in the cloud" right now... and can't quite justify
paying for it... yet ;-)

As for formats, I see a use for jpeg2000/webp (yeah, looks like jpeg2000 is
pretty much dead for web...) - and for DNG. But DNG would (for now) be for
archival storage. Which may or may not be a use case you want to cover.

~~~
supo
Thanks for the compliment :) The focus of the service has to do with the focus
of the interface, that is why community based services (500px, flickr, social
networks as such) will always have a polluted interface (comment widgets,
buttons etc) because they need to generate engagement around user content. I
could be wrong here about the extent to which this pollution actually matters
for users.

With dofsome we are trying to separate the photo presentation into a stand-
alone service and allow the user to use their social services as distribution
channels for their content.

Yeah, no point in competing with S3, better focus on a product built on top of
it ;-)

At the moment I am thinking about just doing imports from online backup
solutions and really focus on the presentation. For a viable storage MVP you
definitely need device specific uploaders..

~~~
e12e
The reason I mention DNG is because it can be used as "superset" archiving
format. It should be feasible to accept pretty much any kind of RAW in,
archive a copy of the raw in the DNG (or just trust the conversion) -- and so
let the users have an original on your servers. Again, not sure if you want to
be a backup/archive for images, or just a point of publication (for me that is
all that jpeg/png will ever be -- and it's not really something _I_ am
interested in paying for -- I would still have to deal with the headache of
"publishing" from my Digital Negatives -- and maintaining that collection).

As camera technology continue to improve and storage continue dropping in
price (at least on the camera end, flash cards etc) I suspect more and more
low end cameras will support some form of DNG-format.

------
solidgumby
Nice interface.

When you click on a picture, the slideshow should be paused by default. I
found it annoying when the picture I was checking changed automatically.

I did not see the pause button at first sight, you should make it bigger and
put it bottom center, and by default it should be a "play slideshow" button.

~~~
genwin
When I clicked on a few pictures, they expanded, which I expected. Later (in
Berlin) I clicked on a picture and got a slideshow. I much prefer seeing all
the pictures and clicking on the ones I want to zoom in on. It is indeed a
great interface. My vote is a "play slideshow" button; otherwise, make zooming
in on the pic the behavior when a pic is clicked.

------
state
"Because I want to share photos across all my online and offline personas -
not tie them down to a single social network or app."

I'm personally happy to know that this is the underlying sentiment, and I'd
guess that the photo community feels the same way.

~~~
supo
Yep, this is the key idea that makes/breaks dofsome as a product. I'm a hobby
photographer myself and dofsome is aimed to fix my own problems, so in this
way I hope it to be at least somewhat representative of other similar people's
needs.

------
zmmmmm
Is your target professionals or consumers?

As a consumer I'm always incredibly wary of things that seem too good to be
true. I don't understand how you can scale the economics of $8/month with
_unlimited_ storage. When I see that it induces scepticism that you'll be
around for the long term, and one thing I _really_ do not want is my lifetime
archive of photos suddenly disappearing on me one day.

A second point - for me these days, getting photos uploaded to storage is as
key as the storage itself. If you have a story about that (smart phone apps,
background uploaders, APIs, dropbox, picasa, flickr or other integration) then
I would like to see it. The drag and drop is neat, but it doesn't work at
scale. I want something that's going to upload the photos automatically.

~~~
supo
Hi,

zenfolio.com and similar cater to a professional market where people shoot
photos for a living, e.g. events like weddings & ceremonies and they upload
lots of big files. And they offer an unlimited account for $50/year. In this
case it is always important how the average volume amortizes across a big user
base.

Yep, an uploader would be neat but it gets really ugly really fast with many
different platforms to think about.

The problem with an import from other services seems to be image quality
(services like social networks) or API availability (photo hosting services
for pro photographers).

The drag'n'drop is the best we could do on the "our effort"/"user convenience"
scale for an MVP, I am definitely thinking hard about ways to get in images
fast and in the original quality.

Maybe the right way is to focus on dropbox/backup storage imports.

If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them :)

~~~
e12e

      > an uploader would be neat but it gets really ugly really
      > fast with many different platforms to think about.
    

Support webdav (or sftp). There are good free dav-clients for windows now (and
all the other os' have supported webdav for years). Webdav should be easier to
integrate with an existing infrastructure based around http.

edit: You might even easily create your own webdav-client for windows (the
black sheep when it comes to dav-support), either working off existing dav-
libraries, or possibly by throwing some money at an existing free/shareware
project.

------
troymc
Initial thoughts:

\- "Dofsome... How am I supposed to pronounce that?" After a minute of
hypotheses, I realized that it's a clever mashup of DOF (Depth of Field, i.e.
photography jargon) and Awesome. I wonder how many people will figure that
out. Maybe give a pronunciation hint somewhere, e.g. (pronounced DOFF-some).
(Doff some? Doff some what? Some clothing? Is this an intentional double
entendre?)

\- The key feature, the full-width gallery of thumbnails, seems like a feature
that would be easy for others to replicate. Google+ albums are already similar
but with chrome around them. Squarespace has some templates with similar look;
their hosting also starts at $8/month, but they offer way more than photo
galleries/portfolios.

\- I'm also reminded of Jux (jux.com) which is a beautiful idea. If you
haven't explored their demos, please do! I'd happily pay for a Jux-based
website, but they decided to be free, and so I won't go anywhere near them;
why would I host my photos on a service that has no way to keep running long-
term?

~~~
supo
Thanks for the feedback!

\- Yeah, we were afraid that the name is too clever for System 1 [1] to
understand. On the other hand it feels good once you get it and it makes you
feel kinda like a photography insider :) Also I'm not a native English
speaker, but my English friends could pronounce it even without having an idea
about d.o.f.

\- There is no single particularly clever part about this, just the G+ style
grid made possible by on-the-fly image rendering/resizing with imgix.com [2]
and the absence of chrome/distractions. My company is working on a much more
advanced photo hosting solution and we basically launched this to have a
really minimalistic service to which we will be able to trickle down advanced
behind-the-curtain stuff once it is proven to work for users.

\- will check jux.com out thanks!

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-
Kahneman/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-
Kahneman/dp/0374275637) [2] imgix.com - these guys are just starting out so it
is bumpy sometimes, but I've been recommending them because it is such a good
idea

------
morsch
I'd like a way to be able to access a full-resolution version of the image.
(Fwiw I didn't watch the video.)

I couldn't zoom in the image with with browser zoom (ctrl-+/wheelup), it
breaks badly when I do that (Firefox nightly Ubuntu).

~~~
supo
Actually at one point I had a branch with a 1 step zooming functionality in
the slideshow (basically a 2x zoom with a huge image download and 'follow-
cursor' panning).

But I abandoned it to improve focus and simplify the UI.

Zooming on the client brings no additional details, so I doubt is very useful.
Care to share a use-case for this?

~~~
morsch
Zooming in makes it easier to discern certain details. This is true, to a
point, even if it increases the zoom beyond 1:1. This is increasingly true as
the screen DPI get higher, and you can't make out individual pixels. Even
zoomed in to 200%, a photo displayed on a "retina" iPad doesn't look jagged,
it's just bigger. The same is true on a regular TFT viewed from a few feet
away.

Apart from that, breaking browser zoom is just rude. It's a standard feature
of the browser and apps/pages should never mess with it. I'm not saying you
must have an application level zoom (e.g. by hooking the mwheel events), but
breaking browser zoom is just not okay.

------
colmvp
$8/month ($96/year) seems kind of steep considering that's more expensive than
Flickr and 500px pro-type accounts.

FWIW I really like this idea and focus.

------
shawn-butler
My initial response was that I would use it but I'm price sensitive thanks to
500px accounts ($20 & $50 yr).

Flickr also includes video so that might be something to iterate.

Maybe you could offer subdomain for that price?

Excellent design. I prefer the static display as default over the slideshow. I
want to appreciate the image quality not use it as a digital frame.

------
tehabe
The video is a nice idea but it would be better if I could browse the demo
shown in the video myself, just try the UI out, w/o register, w/o uploading
photos. Just see how it looks and works.

Edit: Just found the demo, but it is too close to the "Register" button. I
didn't notice that it is a separate button.

------
supo
Thanks for the terrific feedback guys, here AND the UserVoice.

To be honest, I am super-surprised that nobody complained about the google-
only login. Maybe a sampling bias here at HN?

------
donniefitz2
I really like this. Great idea. The main issue I see is pricing. I would offer
a yearly option. Also, creating a Lightroom plugin would go a long way with
more serious photographers.

~~~
supo
It is one thing to write the price on the homepage (it seems to me that a
monthly smaller price is easier on the eyes than the yearly lump) and to
actually charge, where you can offer a monthly and a slightly discounted
yearly option.

LR plugin or really any kind of uploader would be nice, I'll definitely look
into how hard it is to do the plugin. General desktop syncing with a full-
blown GUI seems much harder.

------
zapt02
well-focused service in an interesting space. i'm not serious enough about
photography to pay the price tag, but would love to see how this develops -
best of luck to you.

------
3amOpsGuy
I think you're missing a trick. Genuinely chrome-less could be pretty useful,
and more attractive.

The small black navigation bar at the top of the screen could be done away
with, if you change your URL structure to be more easily understood &
manipulated.

From shoulder surfing various people of various levels of tech experience,
i've noticed they are quite happy to edit a logically structured url in the
address bar to navigate where they want to go quickly. For example, if the
site doesn't provide an easy "up one level" ability.

~~~
imissmyjuno
Argument against: some browsers don't show the URL, e.g. Firefox on Android,
which shows the page title in the URL bar when the focus is away from the
field.

~~~
3amOpsGuy
Safari for iOS is probably a less obscure example - as you scroll down the
page, the address bar will scroll off screen.

These interactions are expected by their users, and they know how to navigate
around them.

I wouldn't be hasty and say i don't think it'd be a material concern, on the
contrary, it could make for some interesting A/B testing!

------
powertower
You should disable the Google Ads in the video.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Er, I'd say that "Chrome-less" is a better description. You do have a GUI,
it's just its chrome that is mostly invisible.

~~~
supo
Good point, fixed the title!

I am used to explaining to non-computer people and they have no idea what
chrome is and GUI = buttons basically for them. :)

------
wiradikusuma
The video quality is not sharp and it's got ads from YouTube so it doesn't
look professional. Other than that, congrats!

~~~
supo
Unfortunately youtube loads a resolution that is smaller or equal to the
embedded frame, I didn't find a way to force full hd. If you full-screen it
and then change the resolution, it should play nicely.

The adds are there because I might have mixed some copyrighted music in the
background, will have to iterate on that.

In general, the youtube embedded videos are probably not a professional way of
putting a video on a product homepage. But it is definitely the
cheapest+easiest way.

~~~
whalesalad
Try Vimeo instead of YouTube.

------
Gmo
Maybe that's too late for you to see it, but it would be great if there would
be other login possibilities than google.

~~~
supo
Any other authentication provider you had in mind, or just a direct login?

~~~
Gmo
Hum, even less likely you would see that one, but I meant direct login (or
Mozilla Persona)

------
epa
I think your pricing per month is a bit too high. Looks like a good service
though.

~~~
supo
We are still trying to figure it out, but based on the feedback we got here we
will probably bring it down a bit. I'd like to avoid multi-tiered pricing if
at all possible.

What would be an acceptable price from your point of view? (it would also help
to know a bit more about your relation to photography ;-)).

~~~
epa
Have been into web photography for around 5 years, past flickr pro user.
Finding a upload service that accepts large (10 mb) photos has been tough. I
just think the price is too high and $5 a month would be my target.

~~~
supo
We will probably go with $5 mo./25GB with some mechanism to extend the limit
if needed.

How many of those 10mb photos do you roughly have in your use-case?

~~~
epa
Over 5000. But doubtful that I would upload them all. maybe 200 max. I think a
photo limit as flickr has done is the best format that a site like your can go
with. Heavy users are willing to shell out extra for more photo limit
(unlimited). I think you need a free option though (even if it's limited).

------
nvr219
I think this looks really slick. Good job!

~~~
supo
Thanks! I am not a front-end guy and this is really an experiment and a
learning experience so this goes a long way :-)

