

Photo uploading is broken - ananddass
http://blog.filepicker.io/post/31287543532/photos-are-a-b-tch-photo-uploading-is-broken

======
jc4p
I just want to add in my experience in this field and using Filepicker.io as a
service:

We spent the better part of two weeks introducing inline images into our
social network's stream which worked by the user copy-pasting a URL to a
youtube video/vimeo video/imgur gallery page/imgur photo page/direct link to
any image mimetype into their status update box and posting it. If they did
this, some javascript would (almost) magically show a preview of the attached
media and show them that it would be displayed inline. We thought it was
awesome and would be the greatest thing ever.

No one used it.

Not only that, our biggest assumption was wrong: Our users didn't know how to
upload photos from their computers onto imgur or another photo upload service,
if they were told they could copy/paste the URL to an image and have it show
up.

Luckily, the weekend after we released this feature Filepicker was announced
and we jumped on it right away, I set up a new version of inline images on our
site using Filepicker and our previous method combined in less than 2 days,
and it was live that Monday, and guess what? While most people still don't add
images on our site, the usage rate has almost gone up by 10x.

~~~
bunkat
BidKat actually used a very similar model in our MVP - users would upload
images to imgur and then copy and paste the link to add the image to their
auction. We had the same results, nobody had any idea how to use it or even
what we were talking about.

We looked at Filepicker.io but just couldn't justify the cost. I also had a
hard time putting a core part of our business in the hands of somebody else.
We see it too often where you take a hard dependency like this and then the
service either goes down or worse, gets acqui-hired.

We now just use a simple link the user clicks on to add an image from their
computer which then gets processed and uploaded to S3. Took me about 1/2 a day
to code up and my monthly cost is about $1.50. I admit it isn't fancy. We
don't have drag and drop, you can't add images from Dropbox or Facebook
directly, but it works for us and our customers.

~~~
ananddass
We plan to be around. There are investors and customers who would hate to see
us end up with the outcomes you listed. So we plan on pushing forward hard on
product and market. As regards your comment on pricing...would love to learn
about the elements of the pricing structure that was unfavorable to your
context. This is valuable feedback. I am adass[at]filepicker.io

~~~
bunkat
Everyone plans to be around :) The fact is that if some company decided to
hand you $500 mil to acquire you and shut down Filepicker.io you would (and
you should!). In terms of the price, it really came down to the integration. I
want everything on my site to look fully integrated. I couldn't justify
spending $500 a month to achieve this with Filepicker.io when I could do it
myself for $1.50 a month for a good enough solution.

------
losvedir
Oh, how timely! My startup has been pondering whether to incorporate
filepicker.io after someone recommended it to us. Photos are extremely
important for our site, but for now we've just been using a basic multipart
form upload which has been a pain.

I've looked through the docs briefly, but couldn't find exactly this question
answered: Can we force our users to crop their photos to a certain dimension
with filepicker.io? I played with the Aviary demo and was able to crop, but I
couldn't tell if there was a way for the implementor to specify and lock the
dimensions.

Currently we have users upload their raw photo, then send them to a cropping
page, and then save that, but if we could replace it all in one go with this
tool that would be amazing!

Then, if I'm reading it correctly, we're given a URL and have four hours to
grab the image from you guys?

Lastly, and I feel a little dirty for asking, but I've been working on this
since "what's the worst that can happen?": are any sort of discounts you can
offer for a fellow HN user? We're in TechStars Boston and there's a lot of
cross-talk among the startups about nifty tools and services to use, so I can
assure you we'd promote filepicker.io if it's as amazing and convenient as it
seems!

------
haxplorer
I've been through this precise problem both from a developer's as well as a
consumer's standpoint.

As a developer, when we built Unifyphotos(<http://export.goyaka.com/>) to
transfer photos from flickr to facebook, and got some traffic peaks, it was
lot of work to scale up the download_from_flickr -> scale_photos ->
upload_to_Facebook process, and we had 6 machines just doing this. Wish
Filepicker.io was there back then. We could just have worried about the
features and not the infrastructure. Even better, if Facebook used Filepicker,
there would have been no need for a service to migrate those photos.

From a consumer side, I've often had to download my Facebook profile pic and
upload as profile pic on sites like trello, basecamp, etc. If only they used
Filepicker.io...

------
lyime
Thanks for the Picplum (<https://www.picplum.com>) shout-out guys. We had
specific requirements around custom UI for using Filepicker. We worked with
their team to get it built and integrated in less than a week. Love the
support!

------
grueful
All I want for Photos-Are-Broken Christmas is a plugin to take a Dropbox
folder and display a nicely formatted gallery on a Wordpress blog.

It also wouldn't hurt if Dropbox would stop trying to wrap image links in a
gallery page. Anyway, here's a picture of a robot's shadow on Mars.

[https://photos-3.dropbox.com/thumb/AADVCsDpEacRaKHkyoPhQUU86...](https://photos-3.dropbox.com/thumb/AADVCsDpEacRaKHkyoPhQUU86CojbB5NgdmUcYCRzmJDmw/57442792/jpeg/2048x1536/2/1347336000/0/2/robots_on_mars.jpg/84omoi1ExerNpM9C6hanAGbYitlDpegFqXbIupuhHh8)

Uploading was trivial. Sharing was a bit harder because they made it harder.

Anyone want to make and sell that Wordpress plugin? It would make sharing
trivial for a broad audience with a habit of paying for useful plugins.

~~~
jmathai
You might be interested in OpenPhoto which adds a handful of layers on top of
services like Dropbox and S3.

Here's an example of displaying photos from Dropbox (in this example it's S3).

<http://current.openphoto.me/photos/list>

Disclaimer: I'm a lead dev on the project

<https://github.com/photo/frontend>

------
ananddass
To be clear: Filepicker.io isn't broken.

~~~
BryanB55
When I read the headline the first thing I thought was "uh oh" ... We're
building something with filepicker.io at the moment and I thought the service
was down.

~~~
ananddass
Yeh. Totally my bad. should have been more careful with the phrasing. We are
not down. All is well :-)

------
mickeyben
Totally agree with this.

At letitcast, we're dealing with large video uploads (up to 500Mo), image
uploads and resumes (pdf). Giving to our users a nice experience was very time
consuming.

We had the following requirement for the client side uploader: iE7 support (we
have worldwide inexperienced users), progressbar, multiple file chooser,
client side file type detection (server side too). We ended up using swfupload
+ a lot of js. It mostly work but we're not completely satisfied. Last time we
checked, there was at least two popular uploaders on Github but both of them
are HTML5-only (vs flash based) and didn't offered the same experience in
every browser.

We were first uploading directly to the Rails backend but it eventually killed
our frontends. We experimented with sinatra async, eventmachine and node.js
and endend up using node to handle file uploads, validations, image
processing, S3 storage and video encoding (via zencoder). This was our first
app with node and in less than a week we had our app in production, handling
hundreds of upload/day.

We also had a few suprises with imagemagick causing 100% CPU load
([https://www.google.com/webhp?rlz=1C1CHFX_frFR491FR491&so...](https://www.google.com/webhp?rlz=1C1CHFX_frFR491FR491&sourceid=chrome-
instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#hl=fr&gs_nf=1&tok=unKi0Zf1WCyMYvwHN3PDOA&pq=imagemagick%20hangs%20convert&cp=15&gs_id=27&xhr=t&q=imagemagick+100+cpu&pf=p&safe=off&rlz=1C1CHFX_frFR491FR491&sclient=psy-
ab&oq=imagemagick+100&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=eb6634e6a39aad58&ion=1&biw=1280&bih=552)).

I'm pretty sure I forgot a lot of issues we ran into. We learned a lot along
the way but it's nice to see some people are trying to tackle this issue.

FYI the guys at transloadit also work on this.

------
lobster45
Imgur is beyond simple. <http://imgur.com/>

Drag and drop or control + V is all you need

~~~
jc4p
Check out my other comment on this thread, but even though you and I think
it's incredibly simple almost no one out of my company's (relatively nerdy)
target audience could figure it out.

~~~
jseliger
Whenever people on HN and elsewhere say "X is really simple" and someone
rebuts them, I like to link to this article:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-
of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/) about how 90% of people
apparently don't know how to use ctrl / command-f to find words.

There is no such thing as too simple.

------
oliwarner
"You're doing thing wrong!" says person selling new method for doing things.

I think it's slightly perverse that no browser has attempted to offer a method
for uploading reduced-size photos. I know it's a new set of patents to trample
over but this is a problem that has existed for years that has only been able
to use messy plugins to workaround.

Edit: For clarity I'm talking about extending the <file type="input" /> tag to
include extra attributes for specifying the maximum dimensions of an image. To
me this isn't any weirder than limiting mime-type (which you can through the
accept attribute).

------
bcardarella
You know what is really broken? The "X is broken" record.

~~~
sliverstorm
"You know what's broken? Things being broken."

------
ajtaylor
After some more digging, I suspect we'll be giving filepicker a try at $work.
The value add looks very compelling, especially being able to do things like
crop & resize. Our users have been asking for image resize functionality for
years, but we've never had the time or priority to do it ourselves.

$600/yr for the pro plan is about one day's developer salary. Rather a no-
brainer in my opinion.

------
ChuckMcM
I expect that one of the disruptions here will be dropbox. Photo sharing is
pretty seamless and even those 'on my machine' photos are pretty easy to
export with existing local UX.

~~~
ananddass
Sure. Dropbox is doing an awesome job there. But from the developer
perspective, he will still have to maintain multiple integrations into FB,
Dropbox etc. If the developer treats dropbox as a local drive folder then he
will still have to support things like progress bars, drag and drops etc for
local uploads. So the pain will still remain.

~~~
jseliger
Great comment. I can say, anecdotally, that I send photos to friends / family
using Dropbox all the time. Most of them are slightly confused by the idea at
first, but when the invite e-mail shows up most of them click it and sign up
(Dropbox also cleverly incents me to do this by offering more space for
referrals).

Dropbox, however, started wanting to copy ALL photos from my cameras and/or
Pictures folder to it, which made me bristle because I don't want all my
photos, and especially the NSFW ones, on Dropbox.

>But from the developer perspective, he will still have to maintain multiple
integrations into FB, Dropbox etc.

Yeah. Especially because I'm averse to FB, but Joe down the street loves it,
and Jane mostly uses Picasa, and so on.

------
itmag
I am wondering if you did any testing to determine your pricing? IIRC, patio11
recommends not putting a price for the Enterprise option.

------
pyrotechnick
"Photos are a b*tch: Photo uploading is broken"

If you're going to use profanities, then please, at least use profanities.

"In a free society the biggest danger is that you're afraid to the point where
you censor yourself." - Tim Robbins

~~~
bcardarella
excuse me but these kids are clearly rockstar ninjas and they have earned the
right to speak as they choose!

~~~
pyrotechnick
"Brogrammers" more likely.

~~~
emmett
These kind of ad-hominem comments add nothing to the conversation. Please
don't make them on HN.

~~~
pyrotechnick
<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=emmett>

~~~
emmett
Why are you posting a link to my comments? Don't be a dick.

~~~
bcardarella
These kind of ad-hominem comments add nothing to the conversation. Please
don't make them on HN.

------
batista
> _Imagine all the awesome applications possible if you had access to these
> photos easily._

I cannot. Please, do tell us some of those "awesome applications" if we had
access to several billion photos easily:

> _One of my favourite services that does more with all these photos is
> Picplum. Picplum allows you to print and send your photo prints to loved
> ones._

Awesome... is probably not the right word.

