In addition to upload/drop image, you could also provide an option to enter an URL of online image. That will make it easy for users to try the project very quickly. Then provide an ephemeral preview URL to see the output.
Show HN: A little side project, a watercolor art generator
21–30 of 83 posts
Re: Show HN: A little side project, a watercolor art generator
#22My recommendation: Add examples on the main page, so the new users don't need to overload your site.
Otherwise the process is the following:
I enter the page -> Upload image -> See 4h of queue for getting my result -> I close the tab, leaving there a pending task.
Re: Show HN: A little side project, a watercolor art generator
#23If you can make it with GIMP, you could probably look into OpenGL shaders to do it directly yourself: the processing could be faster and would provide you with more flexibility and coding fun times. I don't know of server-side libraries for that, but on iOS we have MetalPetal which provides some filtering features like ones in Gimp/Photoshop.
Have fun!
Re: Show HN: A little side project, a watercolor art generator
#24Estimated wait time: 6 hours, 33 minutes
Oops, sorry OP for all the traffic :D
Re: Show HN: A little side project, a watercolor art generator
#25Sorry all for the long wait times! Was not expecting much interest. At the very least, I need to look into removing photos from the queue when people exit the page.
I wouldn't even let people add new images to the queue if the wait period is over, say, 10 minutes.
Re: Show HN: A little side project, a watercolor art generator
#26The message on the page:
It's a busy day! There are currently 512 people in front of you. Please keep this tab open!
Estimated wait time: 7 hours, 7 minutes
Re: Show HN: A little side project, a watercolor art generator
#27Now: Estimated wait time: 9 hours, 49 minutes...
The hug is getting tighter ;-)
Re: Show HN: A little side project, a watercolor art generator
#28Perhaps put the wait time on the homepage - If I'd known you were running at an 8 hour delay I wouldn't have added to it!
Re: Show HN: A little side project, a watercolor art generator
#29> I'd like to play around with is swapping the GIMP script for an AI-based process
Dall-e offers an API with some limitations (max 4MB square PNG, content filtering): https://beta.openai.com/docs/guides/images/usage
Photopea.com has a watercolor filter, in JS, all client side. It's not very good ATM so there's certainly room for improvement. Doing it all client side would solve the queue problem.
Re: Show HN: A little side project, a watercolor art generator
#30Fortunately OP, experience with AI is generally unrelated to success with Stable Diffusion / DALLE.
What you want to gain is experience with prompt engineering for these tools.
Here's a good resource https://openart.ai/promptbook