Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You • Hacker News Board

Re: Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You

#41

Post by brlewis » Tue, Aug 09, 2011, 3:01 AM UTC

alanning wrote: post #40

I've been looking for something like this but as a desktop photo backup app with cloud option. With two young kids I have tons of pictures and videos to wade through and its just not cost effective to store it all on the cloud when 2TB drives cost $100. But it is _such_ a pain for my wife and I when we consolidate pics from our various devices and then do a backup to multiple USB drives. And its just going to get wor…

Actually, even very dumb algorithms totally destroy the problem you describe in your third paragraph.

Even if all you do is organize by date and show the first few photos for each day ("featured" photos), that's enough to vary the stream of photos people browse through.

I speak from experience, as someone who runs a photo-sharing site that organizes by date. I also make it easy to switch between featured/non-featured for any photo, but doing such switching is not a prerequisite. You already have a nicely varied collection just by uploading.

From what I've seen of Snapjoy so far, their format also guarantees variety. I haven't seen the fancy algorithms in action yet, but I imagine there are techniques one could use to make the initial set of "featured" photos more likely to be varied.

Re: Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You

#42

Post by bryanallen22 » Tue, Aug 09, 2011, 3:08 AM UTC

I saw this at work, signed up, and uploaded a few pics. I wanted to check it out later when I had more time. By the time I got home, I had forgotten the name of the service. I checked my email to see some kind of welcome message, but I didn't get one.

While I appreciate your efforts not to spam, a simple email might help your users find you, learn know how to use your service, etc.

Re: Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You

#43

Post by rodh257 » Tue, Aug 09, 2011, 6:44 AM UTC

I like the idea, definitely need a Windows client though. I think you should also release pricing pretty soon, I don't want to go through the effort of uploading photos if its going to be very expensive all of a sudden. I'd also like to point out that 'a few gigs' is not very many photos these days. I'm not photographer but I had 3-4 gigs of photos after my recent 3 week trip to the USA on just a fairly basic digital camera.

Your price point is going to be a tricky one to pick. Dropbox charges around $10 for 50gb, which if I was only using it for photo backups, would be too much, and I'd not do it.

Re: Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You

#44

Post by dfischer » Tue, Aug 09, 2011, 7:06 AM UTC

Is there anything else on the market that is similar to this? I'm just curious for comparisons.

I'm definitely hesitant to use this because of lack of pricing, and I also have no idea what's "smart" about this besides it being organized by date. I don't want to upload 1,000 photos and see it in action. Show me examples on the site.

There's no easy way of sharing photos either which is a deal breaker for now.

Re: Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You

#45

Post by iaskwhy » Tue, Aug 09, 2011, 7:34 AM UTC

rorrr wrote: post #14

jpren wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot more than that meets the eye happening beneath the surface. When you have a thousand photos up there, you'll get a better feel of our algorithmic clustering.

Well, can you just tell us what the features are?

Why can't you try it instead? It's free...

There's at least some work by the algo to recognise different moments of the same day, I still need to upload more pictures to try to understand it correctly.

Re: Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You

#46

Post by alok-g » Tue, Aug 09, 2011, 8:11 AM UTC

iaskwhy wrote: post #45

rorrr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, can you just tell us what the features are?

Why can't you try it instead? It's free... There's at least some work by the algo to recognise different moments of the same day, I still need to upload more pictures to try to understand it correctly.

- It takes longer to try than to read

- I wouldn't want to sign up or upload any of my pictures before I know that I am going to actually use the site

Re: Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You

#47

Post by jpren » Tue, Aug 09, 2011, 8:24 AM UTC

Omnipresent wrote: post #35

I can not upload my pics that have extension JPG instead of jpg. jpg == JPG?

Ah I believe that issue occurred before when you're on Linux only. It should be fixed now.

Re: Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You

#48

Post by iaskwhy » Tue, Aug 09, 2011, 10:13 AM UTC

alok-g wrote: post #46

iaskwhy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't you try it instead? It's free... There's at least some work by the algo to recognise different moments of the same day, I still need to upload more pictures to try to understand it correctly.

- It takes longer to try than to read - I wouldn't want to sign up or upload any of my pictures before I know that I am going to actually use the site

I understand but that's like saying you won't be using Google because they didn't explain the algo. Or you won't try the iPhone because they don't explain the algo that makes it scroll so gently. And so on.

It's free, you can try it if you really want. You can even use someone else's pictures. Asking for the algo seems too much.

Re: Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You

#49

Post by hopeless » Tue, Aug 09, 2011, 10:34 AM UTC

EwanG wrote: post #18

My feature requests (as they have been for every service I've tried from Flickr, to 500px, to Smugmug): 1) Let me upload my RAWs. Better if you can display them as is, but at least do what Adobe does and show the embedded JPEG if not. 2) Allow me to edit online with HTML5 compatible tools (Adobe's online service will let you edit, but uses Flash for some odd reason). With that I can edit from the road using my iPad.…

RAW files are not for public consumption and should never be shown without processing. They lack contrast and sharpness at a minimum.

Sure, upload the RAW files as a backup (Smugmug provide a "Vault" service for this reason) but if you're not going to process your RAW files then you'd be better off shooting in JPEG and configuring the in-camera processing correctly.

Re: Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You

#50

Post by hopeless » Tue, Aug 09, 2011, 10:36 AM UTC

dschobel wrote: post #29

mrkurt wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have there been companies that were acquired and just shut down/deleted everything? The ones I've seen just said "we're ceasing operations in 90 days, please back your data up".

My concern isn't their vanishing overnight. My concern is recommending the service to my 70 year old father and getting a confused phone call from him about why his bookmarks are broken and instead lead to an acquisition notice and then having to walk him through the export process. In other words, the value to me in recommending these services to my friends and family is 1) that they'll use them and see some benefit…

That's one of the things I've loved about Smugmug over the past 5-6yrs: they're profitable, they're independent and they don't have any intention of selling out. They're a brand I trust and believe in, which is why I give them my money.