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.
Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting
31–40 of 52 posts
Re: Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting
#32The video quality is not sharp and it's got ads from YouTube so it doesn't look professional. Other than that, congrats!
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…
Try Vimeo instead of YouTube.
Re: Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting
#33Nice, 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 > NxGB 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?)
Re: Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting
#34Is 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.
Re: Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting
#35Nice, 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…
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.
Re: Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting
#36Is 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…
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 :)
Re: Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting
#37Nice, 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…
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 sho…
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.
Re: Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sho…
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/…
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..
Re: Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting
#39I'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).
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?
Re: Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting
#40"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.
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.