Most people I know do it via some form of API integration with desktop photo managers. Lightroom/Aperture plugins come to mind (I think it's built-in to Lightroom now?)
The trick is also that most photo sharing sites don't actually have a good way to manually upload photos. Most (see: Instagram, Facebook, etc) excel only when you go through their apps.
>It works by using a Mac/Safari plugin that installs in seconds and doesn't require a browser restart. It makes uploading a cinch. Why don't all photo sites do this? We have no idea.
I would be willing to bet that some people don't like installing a plugin and that is why the other photo sites don't do that.
That's true. However, a lot of photos sites have uploaders to make upload more convenient. (I believe there's usually a 5-file limitation when doing HTML upload or something like that, right?* Plus, you need to select each picture one by one)
This is basically the same thing. Except that it's right in the browser rather than a separate tool. And looking at their product, it seems to make a lot of sense.
But, I wouldn't be surprised if the thought process for many of the photo sites was: do we make one uploader for Windows and one for Mac or do we make a plugin for Safari for Mac, Firefox for Mac, Safari for Windows, Internet Explorer… (without even thinking about versions of OS)
* edit: apparently there are no limits but the one sites put themselves. The biggest limit is the need to go file by file.
At Photosleeve we're trying to eliminate the photo workflow. We've made it so that you can plug in your camera, and a few minutes later have an email full of your photos that you can share. No more manual copying, resizing, rotating, uploading, backing-up, etc. Just one step.
We recently enabled signups and are looking for feedback. Here are some specifics:
* We use a two-stage upload process so we can satisfy instant gratification and give lasting peace of mind. First, smaller versions of your photos are uploaded so that you can share quickly. Once that's done we back up your original photo data to S3. You can use the originals for printing, or just so you can stop worrying about your hard drive crashing and taking your photos with it.
* You can upload photos from your camera to email/web in a single step (copies, rotates, resizes, uploads, sends email) using the Windows desktop app
* Alternatively, you can upload using the web-uploader, which also resizes photos before uploading them, and does it all right within your browser (uses Silverlight + Flash)
* We'll send you an email with thumbnails of your photos right in it (HTML mail) that you can forward to people without clogging their inboxes
* You can use drag-and-drop within your browser to create albums, export to Facebook, order prints, create another email, etc. You can try some actions on our demo site, http://www.photosleeve.com/user/demo/album/eiffel-tower
Well if you have an app or website that enables photosharing, you'd want to capture content from offsite and deliver it into your gallery.
Importing stuff from the big sites--Flickr, et al is great, but say someone has everything sitting on their personal webpage or scattered on site around the internet?
Instead of making them save, then re-upload a bookmarklet is great.
You can upload directly from Lightroom using something like jfriedl's plug-in. Works great.
I agree that galleries of some sort would be a great addition. I put a lot of photos up on flickr so they're available to myself and others. But I'd like the ability to showcase a more curated collection.
Why upload them anywhere? Take the photos and store them on your computer/phone/backup drive. I mean if the goal is to have some nice photos you can look back on but remove the element of crazing likes etc. why even bother uploading them to your own website?
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.
For gphotos at least, could I not just put them in an album that's shareable by link and then paste that link into Runway for it to ingest from? There'd still be an "upload" stage, of course, but not involving someone's home internet.
For most people, I would bet that sending over email is the easiest thing. Create an address specifically for photos and write a script to download the attachments. You might run into issues with attachment sizes of course. But hopefully most people only have 5-10 photos they want to share. For those who want to give you a whole roll of shots, they might just be the edge case where they can just upload to their a shared GDrive or Dropbox.
Atlas/Cappuccino doesn't solve this problem, because it's constrained by what the browser provides us. However it's possible to integrate custom plugins to do these sort of things, if absolutely necessary.
Picurio (YC W09) has a browser plugin to allow uploading of photos directly from your digital camera. The GUI frontend is built with Cappuccino and integrates with this plugin. http://picurio.com/
Upload your images, they extract EXIF for metadata, resize it and upload to all your services. Automatically social sharing buffer comes with analytics aggregated from all your services - you can now see how popular your work is and why.
The trick is also that most photo sharing sites don't actually have a good way to manually upload photos. Most (see: Instagram, Facebook, etc) excel only when you go through their apps.
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